There is one reservation about the celebration of our centennial Double Tenth National Day on Monday. In English, the sobriquet is perfectly all right. Not so in Chinese. Officially, in Chinese, it's our National Day in celebration of the 100th founding anniversary of the Republic of China. There is something wrong there.
Many people, particularly native speakers of English, insist on calling our national day Double Ten Day.
Well, it makes sense. There are two “Ten's” there, for the Chinese Revolution of 1911 broke out on the tenth day of the tenth month. The Chinese don't call months the way the Westerners do. To us, it's not Oct. 10. That's why translators of China's post-imperial days rendered our national day as Double Tenth Day.
The fact is that this year doesn't mark 100 years of the Republic of China. It marks 100 years of the Chinese Revolution, which started in Wuchang, now renamed part of Wuhan. Remember, Dr. Sun Yat-sen, father of the Chinese republic, wasn't even in China when soldiers rose against their Manchu commanders in Wuchang to kick off the revolution. As a matter of fact, he learned of the revolution by reading the newspaper in Denver, Colorado, two days after the uprising. He tried to rush back to China, but managed to reach Shanghai on Christmas Day, Dec. 25. Four days later, he was elected provisional president of the Republic of China by 17 “dujun,” commanders of provincial garrison forces who were the real powers in as many provinces in central China. Upon election, Dr. Sun sent an open cable to Yuan Shih-kai or Yuan Shikai, offering the post he was about to assume if the latter could persuade Emperor Henry Puyi to abdicate. Dr. Sun had to do so, because Yuan, who wanted to be the emperor himself, had sent his well-trained troops to Wuchang to bludgeon but not finish the revolutionaries just to show that he was the real master of China. Of course, no answer came at once, whereupon Dr. Sun proceeded from Shanghai to Nanjing to assume office, launching the Republic of China on Jan. 1, 1912. To put it plainly, the Republic of China should celebrate its centennial next year, rather than this year.
On the other hand, the celebration of a birthday can take place before the day it falls on, according to our ages-old custom. So it really doesn't matter whether we celebrate the centennial of the founding of the Republic of China this year or next, but we can't call last Monday our centennial Double Tenth National Day. Probably the designers of the celebration still count the age of our country the way some of us still count theirs. Unlike the Westerners, a Chinese is considered one year old when he or she is born. Born on Dec. 31, a baby is two sui or two years old on the following morning of January 1. The kind-hearted designers must have followed the ages-old custom to take one year off the century to mark the centennial of the Republic of China one year ahead.
One more reservation: The jubilant yearlong celebration is all right, if it is not funded by the government, which is having a really hard time attempting to reduce at least a bit of the colossal mountain of national debt. Let fat cats finance whatever expensive gala events they want to make publicity for their contributions. They need it to shed their bad name.
The yearlong celebration reminds us of the one the Japanese held in 1940 to mark the 2,600th anniversary of their Empire. It's a hoax, however. Their government-paid historians dated the founding of the empire by their first Emperor Jinmu Tennou, who didn't exist, 600 years before it actually came into being. The 1940 celebration in colonial Taiwan wasn't as expensive as the ongoing one in the Republic of China, but in less than one year Japan attacked Pearl Harbor to begin the end of the Japanese Empire.
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