Rong-Xuan Chu & Chih-Tung Huang, "The day after the apology: A critical discourse analysis of President Tsai’s national apology to Taiwan’s indigenous peoples"

Number seven in an occasional series of summaries of articles related to communication practices in Taiwan. 

Chu, R.-X., & Huang, C.-T. (2021). The day after the apology: A critical discourse analysis of President Tsai’s national apology to Taiwan’s indigenous peoples. Discourse Studies, 23(1), 84-101, https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445620942875

I want to start this by saying that this post will primarily focus on the article--I'm not, at this point, going to get into a larger discussion of what the Tsai administration has done in terms of reconciliation with or reparations to the Indigenous people since the time of her apology. 

Rong-Xuan Chu, according to her bio at the bottom of the article, is an applied linguist; Chih-Tung Huang, according to his bio, is an Indigenous scholar who is interested in ethnic/indigenous policy. This article focuses on the August 1, 2016 official apology given by Taiwan's president on behalf of the R.O.C. government to the Indigenous peoples of Taiwan for the R.O.C.'s role in the oppression of the Indigenous people. It analyzes the language of Tsai's apology speech, including her uses of the verb "apologize," the modal verb "will," and pronouns "I," "we," and "they." They explain that she directly apologizes instead of expressing "regret" (a term that is usually seen as not being an apology, as they point out, and as Hang Zhang observed in an article on the Hainan Island plane incident of 2001). 

However, they also argue that her use of "will," a modal that can refer to both future and present actions, weakens the commitment to change because it "allow[s] for a certain degree of ambiguity and doubt regarding her determination to uphold the reconciliation" (p. 90). They also argue that "will" can in places denote "capacity or power," which suggests that "Tsai viewed her government as the power holder who could influence the success or failure of the reconciliation" (p. 91). 

It's at this point where I wish the authors had specified which Mandarin modal verb(s) Tsai was using that meant "will." Are all the wills in English translating the same word in Chinese? The authors published an article in Chinese in 2019 on Tsai's apology speech, which I guess I'll have to read at some point to answer this to my satisfaction.

They also look at the pronouns used in the speech, noting that Tsai seems to separate Indigenous people from the rest of Taiwan's society by using "they" to refer to them while using the second-person plural to refer to the government and (presumably non-Indigenous) Taiwanese citizens. 

In discussing the political context of the apology, they observe (among other things), the KMT response in the form of a Q&A with Hung Hsiu-chu, former KMT chairperson, who said, “I wonder whether she [President Tsai] deliberately wants to use the aboriginal conception of Taiwan’s history to exclude the Han/Chinese nationality from the history and even to achieve de-sinicisation” (p. 92, translated by the authors--in a video of her comments, Hung says, 「要懷疑她是不是想用這個，故意用這個所謂的原住民史觀來排斥這個漢民族的史觀，甚至去中國化的一個史觀，結果形成一個另外一個史觀？我覺得，不能講說我們懷疑她的這個動機跟用心，但是難免會讓人家打上問號」。 I'd add that her use of 所謂的--"so-called"--in describing the Indigenous historical perspective seems dismissive either of Tsai's conception of that perspective or of the perspective itself.)  

The authors go on to argue that the whole apology ceremony received mixed reviews from the public--and, especially important, from the Indigenous recipients of the apology. While some appreciated it, there were several complaints. The venue, which was the President's mansion, was criticized as requiring the victims "to go to the perpetrator's home to accept [the] apology" (p. 94), and the staging of the apology, the authors argue, resembled an emperor summoning Indigenous subjects to an audience. 

In the end, Chu and Huang argue that "the apology did not seem to bring comfort to the indigenous peoples, rather it reawakened the long-simmering conflict between the Taiwanese government and the indigenous population over historically unresolved disputes" (p. 96). They conclude, however, that it was an important first step. 

There are other points brought up in the article that make it worth a second reading. I'm not as familiar with CDA (critical discourse analysis) to evaluate the authors' success with this approach or whether the article is making a theoretical contribution to CDA. I'll leave that to others. (Feel free to comment!)