Political Stances and Priorities in National Level General Classification Schemes.

This paper investigates whether and how a national level general classification scheme expresses or reflects its creators' government's political stances and priorities. The following two national level general classification schemes were studied and compared: Chinese Library Classification, created by the People's Republic of China (PRC), and the New Classification Scheme for Chinese Libraries, created by the Republic of China (ROC). It is found that a nation's or region's political stances and priorities are expressed or reflected in a national level comprehensive classification through the following four venues: (1) prioritizing classes that indicate a nation's, region's, or party's ideology, governance theory, or long-term policies and goals; (2) prioritizing classes of one's leading political party and/or leaders; putting rivalrous political parties and/or leaders in a lower-level class or making them invisible; (3) putting the territory or history of a rivalrous political entity under one's own political entity to show one is a part of the other and; (4) using terms that express the government's or political party's strong political stances (such as anti-, con-, pro-), or neutralizing political terms to soften one's political stances. In (3) and (4), the classification reflects the political stances of the creator's government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]