A Taoyuan city councilor sent the room into peals of laughter, mostly scornful, when she asked officials at a council meeting who Chung Chao-cheng (鍾肇政) is and “whether he is still alive and so famous” that there have to be awards and local buildings named after him.
Widely considered one of the most important advocates of Hakka culture, Chung, now 90 years old, is a literary figure who was born in Taoyuan and has lived there most of his life. He has won national arts awards and medals.
Taoyuan City Councilor Lu Shu-chen (呂淑真) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) did not stop there.
When told that Chung is indeed famous, she asked: “Former [KMT] chairman Wu Poh-hsiung (吳伯雄) is pretty famous too, why are there no awards named after him?”
This episode revealed a deplorable lack of cultural appreciation and knowledge of the nation’s history — or history in general — that is prevalent in the nation. What makes it worse is where this ridiculous conversation took place: the city council. Coupled with its handling of the city’s budget, the council needs to be held accountable for how regrettable local politics could influence young minds.
On Tuesday last week, the council passed next year’s budget for the city — now headed by a Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) mayor — totaling NT$95 billion (US$2.88 billion), after making a small cut of 0.33 percent, or NT$318 million.
However, what is worth noting is that the city’s Department of Youth Affairs was subjected to a disproportionate setback in terms of budget loss — NT136 million of the total NT$318 million cut. Its funding next year will be almost half of this year’s budget of NT$280 million.
At the end of last month, the council’s KMT caucus slammed a department-sponsored activity aimed at developing university and high-school student self-governance groups’ abilities. The KMT threatened to boycott the budget review, accusing the department of using a “biased article by a current candidate that calls the KMT a squanderer” as a teaching material.
The article was an interview conducted by the National Taiwan University Student Association in 2013 with Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌), who is now a New Power Party legislative candidate, but was interviewed as a former president of the association.
In the interview, Huang talked about the historical backdrop against which he served and planned changes as association president.
The campus was striving to democratize and “the intervention of the party-state apparatus was still grave,” Huang said in the article.
In other words, he was talking about the ghost of the KMT on campus only a few years after the end of the Martial Law era, with “KMT-supported clubs going buddy-buddy with the administration and getting subsidies, only to waste them.”
The day after Lu’s ridiculous line of questioning, another KMT councilor continued the attack, but bungled by falsely accusing a lecturer of teaching absurd ideas, quoting a teaching segment that the lecturer later explained was deliberately made fallacious to test students in a critical-thinking class.
No one should underestimate the power and the potential of young people, but the KMT, which still controls many local councils despite the DPP’s performance in last year’s mayoral elections, chooses to stymie rather than promote activities that aim to develop self-understanding and independent thinking among young people. One can only infer that the party has misgivings about the possibility of an enlightened younger generation. Why would it do this? The reason is not difficult to guess.
US aerospace company Boeing Co has in recent years been involved in numerous safety incidents, including crashes of its 737 Max airliners, which have caused widespread concern about the company’s safety record. It has recently come to light that titanium jet engine parts used by Boeing and its European competitor Airbus SE were sold with falsified documentation. The source of the titanium used in these parts has been traced back to an unknown Chinese company. It is clear that China is trying to sneak questionable titanium materials into the supply chain and use any ensuing problems as an opportunity to
It’s not every month that the US Department of State sends two deputy assistant secretary-level officials to Taiwan, together. Its rarer still that such senior State Department policy officers, once on the ground in Taipei, make a point of huddling with fellow diplomats from “like-minded” NATO, ANZUS and Japanese governments to coordinate their multilateral Taiwan policies. The State Department issued a press release on June 22 admitting that the two American “representatives” had “hosted consultations in Taipei” with their counterparts from the “Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs.” The consultations were blandly dubbed the “US-Taiwan Working Group on International Organizations.” The State
The Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) exercises, the largest naval exercise in the region, are aimed at deepening international collaboration and interaction while strengthening tactical capabilities and flexibility in tackling maritime crises. China was invited to participate in RIMPAC in 2014 and 2016, but it was excluded this year. The underlying reason is that Beijing’s ambitions of regional expansion and challenging the international order have raised global concern. The world has made clear its suspicions of China, and its exclusion from RIMPAC this year will bring about a sea change in years to come. The purpose of excluding China is primarily
The Chinese Supreme People’s Court and other government agencies released new legal guidelines criminalizing “Taiwan independence diehard separatists.” While mostly symbolic — the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has never had jurisdiction over Taiwan — Tamkang University Graduate Institute of China Studies associate professor Chang Wu-ueh (張五岳), an expert on cross-strait relations, said: “They aim to explain domestically how they are countering ‘Taiwan independence,’ they aim to declare internationally their claimed jurisdiction over Taiwan and they aim to deter Taiwanese.” Analysts do not know for sure why Beijing is propagating these guidelines now. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), deciphering the