Smuniewski: How does Taiwan blend into Polish politics by promoting a left-wing liberal agenda?

Taiwan has been utilizing culture and education for years as a tool to build its image in the world. 1 component of this strategy is Taiwan Centers for Mandarin Learning (TCML) – institutions that combine language learning with promoting liberal-democratic values, liberal concept of human rights and the thought of diversity (including multiculturalism), including affirmation for LGBT communities.

Democratic Progressive organization (DPP) plays a key function in the ideological and political background Taiwan Center for Mandarin Learning (TCML). It was the government led by DPP in 2021 that launched the TCML program as an alternate to Chinese Confucius Institutes, wishing to advance Mandarin language in spirit Taiwanese Liberal Left.

The Democratic Progressive organization considers TCML as an component of its cultural and linguistic diplomacy, to strengthen Taiwan's global position through education, culture and liberal-democratic values. In practice, this means that the activities of the centres reflect the political imagination of the DPP – highlighting Taiwan's distinctness from mainland China, supporting human rights and promoting a affirmative image of an open and tolerant country, including the LGBT+ community.

Exit and educational programme Taiwan Center for Mandarin Learning (TCML) acts as an crucial component of Taiwan's linguistic and cultural strategy, anchored in the thought of "Mandarin discipline with Taiwanese values". This initiative is supported by Overseas Community Affairs Council (OCAC) and aims to make abroad centres that not only enable learning Mandarin utilizing conventional characters, but besides advance a set of values related to culture, society and past of Taiwan. TCML communication consistently refers to concepts specified as freedom (自由 zìyóu), diversity (多元 duōyuán) and Openness (開放 kāifàng), which makes the language program a tool not only for education but besides for the subtle promotion of a peculiar worldview.

An crucial component of this communication is inclusion of human rights threads, and in peculiar environmental benefits LGBT. The TCML authoritative website contains material entitled ‘Taiwan stand with diversity’, which highlighted that in 2019 Taiwan became the first country in Asia to legalized single-sex marriage. The text presents this event as a milestone on the road to society, which includes diversity, freedom and openness. specified a message combines language learning with promoting liberal values and seeing Taiwan as a liberal state and open to progressive human rights standards.

Elements of this communicative besides appear in TCML social channels, which regularly print posts on the occasion Taipei Pride is International Day of Human Rights. These messages usage hashtags specified as #LGBTQ is #LoveIsLove, thus combining the image of the TCML brand with a circumstantial set of views.

In a broader context, specified actions fit in Taiwan's cultural diplomacy strategywhich aims to strengthen its global image. Given the limited formal designation and political force from the People's Republic of China, Taiwan uses soft force – soft power – to present yourself to the planet as a modern, tolerant and free state. The introduction of single-sex marriages in 2019 became 1 of Taiwan's most highlighted evidences of "progress" and programs specified as TCML let these ideas to naturally be transferred to educational and cultural discourse abroad.

Although the main nonsubjective of TCML remains language learning and promoting Taiwanese culture, its branding and communication clearly reflect the presumption that language is inseparable from valuesTaiwan represents.

Thus TCML functions as an example soft tool for promoting national identityin which language education penetrates the message of democratic and equality values. Taiwan, through specified institutions, not only exports its language and culture, but besides subtly promotes its own social model, based on the above-mentioned demoliberal values.

The Polish branch of the Taiwan Center for Mandarin Learning is presented as an innocent institution promoting language and culture, but in fact it has a much wider function — ideological and political. Under the cover of language education, there is simply a structure that shifts elements of Taiwanese "soft power", firmly rooted in the liberal social agenda. This centre is headed by Dr. Nastasia Nell Stoch, a individual with a dual – Taiwanese-Polish – citizenship, known for his active commitment to the promotion of LGBT rights, abortion and progressive worldview. In social media, she openly supported feminist movements and liberal political environments, including Rafał Trzaskowski during the presidential election, recognising him as a symbol of “modern European Poland”. specified a shaped environment is not neutral. alternatively of focusing solely on learning Mandarin, TCML promotes a circumstantial imagination of the planet – based on moral relativism, liberal postulates and hostility towards conservative values that form the foundation of Polish culture. Stoch collaborators, Taiwanese teachers and activists, openly manifest anti-Chinese and pro-Separatist views, transferring tensions from East Asia to the European context. In their statements, they compare Chinese and conservative political environments to “authoritarianism”, while trying to build in Poland the image of Taiwan as “an oasis of freedom” and “an Asian West”. All of this fits into a broader pattern of soft influence, in which language learning and culture become a tool for shaping public opinion. Taiwan, like another countries, conducts its own cultural diplomacy – but the problem begins erstwhile abroad content is promoted to the Polish value strategy under its name. Poland, with its Christian tradition and conservative ethos, should not be a place where institutions financed from abroad influence the worldview of young people in a secret way, utilizing the authority of education and academic neutrality.

Taiwanese scholarships for Polish listeners – for learning Mandarin – are an extension of the agenda of woke from the USA. It is not without reason that the American left, with the aid of many abroad partners, supports the ideological coup in 3rd countries. As you can see, the primacy of ideology in TCML prevails against the conflict to recognise Taiwan as an independent state from China. It's hard to describe as rational, which is why possibly it's just an extension of what the Americans were spreading during the U.S.A.D....

Konrad Smuniewski