Wei Wou, a professor, seethes with anger when he thinks about Taiwan's decision to ban the writing of official documents from right to left.
For more than 2,000 years, Chinese officials have published documents from right to left, in a top-to-bottom style. The mainland abandoned the layout in the 1950s and next year Taiwan will follow suit. The island is the last Chinese community to maintain the tradition.
The change in text layout may seem trivial, but to people such as Professor Wei the decision is a blow to Chinese tradition.
'This is an action that distances Taiwan from Chinese culture,' said Professor Wei. 'The Democratic Progressive Party wants to westernise Taiwan at the expense of maintaining traditional Chinese culture. This is the deep meaning behind this new law and it's wrong.'
Professor Wei, dean of the international affairs college at Taiwan's Tamkang University, is former deputy secretary-general of the Kuomintang's powerful cultural and communications affairs committee.
In the 1970s and 1980s, he helped supervise Taiwan's Government Information Office, which controlled and often censored the island's media. One aim was to ensure that all publications followed strict layout guidelines for Chinese text.