Myanmar’s Cheng Yu School Keeps Traditions Alive

It is four o’clock in the afternoon, and at the Cheng Yu Middle School, located near Yangon’s Chinatown, several hundred students of ages ranging from six to 15 pour through the campus gates like a school of fish.

Shortly thereafter, from inside a very basic classroom emerges the sing-song sound of reading out loud: “The water flows beneath the expanding colors of dusk / The last glistening rays of the sun dye the Dan­shui River a gilded hue.” In another classroom, students are learning by singing Chinese songs kara­oke style. A small girl, who looks like she is in about the third grade, picks up the microphone and belts out a tune with her teacher: “The young women of Ali­shan are as beautiful as water, the young men of Ali­shan are as strong as the mountains.”

Visitors from Taiwan cannot fail to miss the geographic references: the Dan­shui flows through Tai­pei City to the sea, and Ali­shan is one of central Taiwan’s most popular natural scenic spots.

In Yangon’s Chinese community, where the majority of schools use simplified characters but traditional Chinese characters still have a foothold, the two systems of writing often overlap. The photo was taken at the city’s Confucius Temple.

“In the past Chinese-language education flourished here in Yangon,” says U Maung Hla, the 78-year-old chairman of the Cheng Yu Middle School. “But today Cheng Yu is the sole remaining place that still persists in using textbooks from Taiwan and teaching children using traditional, complex-form Chinese characters, rather than the modern simplified ideographs used in mainland Chinese teaching materials.” He says this with a sigh of genuine regret.

Cheng Yu Middle School was founded in 2000, and was at first called the Cheng Yu Language and Business Center. Its predecessor institution was the “Yangon Overseas-Chinese ­Chiang Kai-shek Middle School,” which just a few decades ago was a very well-known school in Myan­mar. The current name combines Chinese characters meaning “­Chiang Kai-shek” and “alumnus,” referring to the fact that Cheng Yu was founded by graduates from the original CKS Middle School.

There are currently more than 800 students at Cheng Yu, which offers a complete curriculum from nursery school through high school. Because it is currently the only educational institution in Yangon that uses teaching materials from Taiwan, it attracts not only children of Myan­marese of Chinese ancestry, it is also the first choice for the children of Taiwanese businessmen in the country.

George Tseng, a Taiwanese businessman who has been living in Myan­mar for nearly 20 years, says: “If it weren’t for Cheng Yu, I really don’t know where we could find anyone who could teach our children to read and write traditional complex characters.”

Yangon, until recently the capital city of Myan­mar, was once the main bastion of Chinese-language education in the country. Today, it is widely recognized that the city is a “desert” as far as Chinese education is concerned. The reasons for this change are closely tied to the way that Myan­mar’s Chinese immigrant society has evolved.

People of Chinese ancestry living in Yangon have mostly assimilated into local society. For example, rather than drinking traditional Chinese green tea, they favor Myanmar-style milk tea.

Chinese migrants began coming here as early as the Qing Dynasty. They were divided into two groups: “Upper Myan­mar” immigrants who crossed over by land routes from Yun­nan Province in southern China and settled in northern and central Myan­mar, and “Lower Myan­mar” immigrants who came by sea from the coastal Fu­jian and Guang­dong provinces and settled in the southern part of the country.

Chinese were attracted to Myan­mar because of its rich natural endowments and material abundance, which were all the more enticing in contrast to the turbulent conditions in China in the late Qing and early Republican years (from, say, 1860 up through the 1930s). A census taken by the British authorities in 1891 (Burma, as the country was formerly known, formally became a British colony in 1886) showed that there were already some 37,000 Chinese immigrants in the country, and that number had increased to 300,000 by 1941, just prior to the invasion by Japanese forces.

World War II had barely ended when civil war broke out in China between the Nationalist and Communist forces, and after the Communist takeover came the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and other traumatic events, driving wave after wave of migrants out of mainland China. Today, there are more than 2 million persons of Chinese ancestry living in Myan­mar. They are concentrated mainly in the country’s most developed commercial centers (including Yangon in the south, Mandalay in the center, and La­sio, Myit­kyina, and Taung­gyi in the north), and along the China-Myanmar border.

Historically, no matter where Chinese people have settled, they have always considered the transmission of their culture to their children to be of the utmost importance, and have invariably wanted their sons and daughters to receive a Chinese education. The result is that Chinese schools have sprung up wherever Chinese have migrated.

In the early years, most Chinese-language education in Myanmar was limited to private academies along the lines of traditional Confucian private schools in China. However, starting in the early 20th century, a number of modern schools were founded that offered systematic Chinese-language education. By 1948, just before Myan­mar became independent of British rule, there were more than 200 Chinese schools across the country. Yangon alone had 27.

The situation changed dramatically at the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949. In all Overseas Chinese communities, Chinese-language newspapers and schools divided sharply and confrontationally along political lines, with some being pro-mainland and others being pro-ROC. Myanmar’s Overseas Chinese community likewise divided into “Red” and “White” factions, and the rivalry was most ferocious among Chinese schools in Yangon. For example, it was not unusual to hear about kids from the pro-Taiwan CKS Middle School trading insults with students from pro-Beijing schools.

In 1962 General Ne Win seized power, initiating 50 years of military rule. In an effort to weaken the power of Overseas Chinese and their schools, the Myan­mar government in 1965 issued directives nationalizing all private schools. Teachers of Chinese citizenship were all dismissed, leaving only teachers with Myan­mar nationality. From that point on, Chinese education could only be carried on in the form of “supplementary schools,” with no such school allowed to have more than 20 students.

As Myanmar has opened to the outside world, products of global capital have poured into the country. In Yangon’s Chinatown, where people have always had a nose for commerce, you can even buy spin-off products from the smartphone game “Angry Birds.”

Many Overseas Chinese were left with no choice but to leave Myan­mar to continue their educations in Chinese-language institutions elsewhere.

Zhao Li­ping, the current chairman of the Myan­mar Overseas Chinese Association, graduated from the Yangon CKS Middle School. In 1964, not long after the military seized power, as the atmosphere in Myan­mar grew increasingly strained, she came to Taiwan to study. Because at that time Overseas Chinese in Myan­mar only had Foreign Residence Certificates and were not allowed to become full citizens, once she left she could not go back, and had to fend for herself in Taiwan while suffering the pangs of homesickness.

“I was actually relatively lucky, because eventually my parents and brothers applied to immigrate to Taiwan. But a lot of my classmates could not go back to Myan­mar and see their families again until the mid-1980s, when the military government relaxed the rules,” says Zhao.

Finally, in 1967, Myan­mar’s Chinese schools, already suffering under the restrictions imposed by the regime, suffered another blow, one that nearly suffocated them entirely.

In that year, Mao Ze­dong launched the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” and this development had a major impact even in Myan­mar, and especially in Yangon, where the Chinese community was more leftist. Crowds of Chinese students, ignoring a government ban, carried busts of Mao onto campuses, touching a raw nerve in the military regime. On June 26, anti-Chinese riots broke out in Yangon. Mobs indiscriminately attacked anyone with lighter-than-average skin and wearing pants (native Burmese wore sarongs), causing countless deaths and injuries. With their personnel and property under threat, all of Yangon’s Chinese schools closed their doors.

The June 26 Anti-Chinese Incident was the darkest moment in the history of Chinese in Myan­mar, and the anti-Chinese wave continued for many months thereafter. Many Chinese migrated once again, with an estimated 100,000 coming to Taiwan at that time. Most settled in what is now ­Zhonghe District of New Tai­pei City, or in Taoyuan County. More than 20,000 others relocated to Macao, while others scattered to mainland China, Hong Kong, Australia, and the US.

Those who remained behind in Myan­mar adopted a low profile. The Overseas Chinese in Yangon in particular, who found themselves at the center of the storm, deliberately acted “Burmese” and obscured their Chinese identity in an attempt to protect themselves. They stopped speaking Chinese, stopped reading Chinese books, changed to local-style names, took to wearing sarongs, and in every way deepened their assimilation into local society.

Yet despite this harsh environment, the spark of Chinese education was never fully extinguished. In southern Myan­mar many never-say-die elderly teachers taught Chinese privately at home. The faculty at CKS Middle School split up, with several dedicated teachers setting up operations that were separate but all used the name “Chiang Kai-shek Middle School Supplementary School.” They were determined to somehow keep alive the name and tradition of their institution.

In the north, far from the political epicenter, Chinese schools continued to operate by pretending to be religious schools or minority peoples’ schools (for Han Chinese living in the Ko­kang or Wa regions, recognized as minority areas by the Myan­mar government). They nominally taught the Buddhist or Confucian classics, or pretended to be for native speakers of minority tongues, but in reality they remained Chinese schools.

The Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission of the ROC government continually provided support to these schools in the form of teaching materials and by offering ethnic Chinese students from Myan­mar the chance to come to Taiwan for university. As a result local people in Upper Myan­mar have been loyal ROC supporters, and Myan­mar has been one of the top five source countries for Overseas Chinese students in Taiwan. In 2011, there were 543 ethnic Chinese students from Myanmar attending college in Taiwan.

The Ne Win regime collapsed in 1988, and the new government adopted more moderate policies. The revival of Chinese education was further aided by the improvement in relations between mainland China and Myan­mar and the rapid increase in border trade. The need for Chinese speakers increased, and Chinese education emerged from its torpor. In northern Myan­mar the number and size of Chinese schools increased.

Yangon’s Chinese schools also emerged from “hibernation” in the 1990s, and numerous Chinese-language institutions were founded. Most have had close links with mainland China and their teachers have been trained in or by mainland China, so they have used simplified Chinese characters.

Meanwhile, a group of elderly graduates from CKS started raising funds to found Cheng Yu. Given their long-established relationship with Taiwan, it emerged as the only Chinese school in all of Yangon to use Taiwan teaching materials with traditional complex characters.

U Maung Hla says frankly that mainland China has in recent years been very active in promoting Chinese education in other countries, and Taiwan needs to do more in this respect.

For example, Cheng Yu has to send someone to Taiwan to buy the teaching materials that they currently use (published by Nani Publishing), which they then photocopy for the students. Mainland China has already approached the school several times and offered to provide textbooks free of charge, and they even donated 20 computers and assigned student-teachers to help with classes. “The amount of help we get from Taiwan is, in comparison, rather small,” says U Maung Hla.

Fortunately, there are still people from Taiwan who feel passionate about this issue and have stepped forward to offer their help. For example, Chih Sheng­yuan, the retired principal of ­Yingge Middle School in New Tai­pei City, through an introduction from the Myan­mar Overseas Chinese Association, went to Yangon in August 2012 to head up Cheng Yu.

Christopher Ho, an Overseas Chinese from Myan­mar who studied in Taiwan and is currently an agent in Myan­mar for the TECO Group, when asked his opinion about the division among Chinese schools abroad between those that use simplified and those that use traditional characters, says that people like him who have used Taiwan textbooks as children and later studied in Taiwan will always have a special place in their hearts for Taiwan. Even after returning home they will be interested in what happens to Taiwan, and will give what help they can. They are the most valuable assets Taiwan could have abroad.

Having emerged from their own dark age and entered an era of pluralization and growth, Myanmar’s Chinese schools are embracing the new situation there. The Chinese language and script are at the core of Chinese ethnic identity, and if they can be kept alive, future generations of Chinese, no matter where they live, will never forget their roots.