Tainan First Senior High School on Wednesday is to inaugurate its first political party, the TNFSH Full-Sugarism Party, to help support students’ democratic literacy.
Freshman Tsai Wei-po (蔡偉柏), a founding member of the new group, said the party was created to bring attention to student self-governance, and to supervise the administration and student association.
“One voice is easy to ignore,” Tsai was quoted as saying by the Chinese-language United Daily News on Friday. “A group has more influence.”
Photo: Liu Wan-chun, Taipei Times
The party has 33 members, but with more than 70 applications pending, out of a student population of 2,101, organizers said, adding that a chairperson and other officials would be appointed during Wednesday’s ceremony.
School principal Liao Tsai-ku (廖財固) on Saturday said the school respects students’ pursuit of democratic literacy and would provide positive guidance.
The TNFSH Full-Sugarism Party charter has seven main objectives, which range from serious to silly.
The party said it would seek to improve the welfare of the entire student body, construct a philosophy of equality within the school and advance students’ civic literacy.
It also intends to use memes to promote student self-governance, as well as the concept of “full sugarism.”
Referring to a well-known joke that Kaohsiung Senior High School (KSHS) governs southern Taiwan under the “Great KSHS Kingdom,” the TNFSH Full-Sugarism Party vowed to resist annexation by the school.
Lastly, the party promised to connect the all-boys school to Tainan Girls’ Senior High School through an underground tunnel.
The Senior High School Education Act (高級中等教育法) stipulates that schools must “guide students to organize self-governing organizations,” which means that students can establish self-governance organizations, but not many students know about this right, Tsai said.
The party founders decided that some humorous goals would help draw attention to the party and inspire other schools to create their own parties, Tsai added.
“Some people might think that we are just ‘kids playing at politics’ or that this has nothing to do with academics, but politics is a part of life,” the freshman said.
Students creating political parties should not be looked upon too seriously or negatively, he said.
Discussing such issues can help “implant democratic literacy in students,” Tsai added.
Although some people have joked that the new party would make the school a “one-party state,” Tsai said he backed the formation of other parties.
“It would give us a chance to analyze all kinds of issues,” he told the newspaper.
The Full-Sugarism Party is not the first student party in Taiwan.
The Taichung First Senior High School student council last year became the first in the nation to pass a “student political party act.”
Three parties were established, although one is at risk of dissolution after it failed to nominate any candidates for party office.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas