The Olympic flag of the Chinese Taipei team was raised, and the National Flag Song (
Taekwondo and archery are not very popular sports events compared to the national sport, baseball -- and players' future prospects are relatively slim. However, these victories show that if the Taiwanese people carefully select events that are suitable for our physique and are willing to work hard, the investment will eventually pay off. The poor performance of Taiwan's baseball team was a disappointment. But problems in the nation's baseball development due to a lack of systematic cultivation and training is more worrisome.
In fact, the success of our Taekwondo contestants and archers resulted from an accumulation of techniques, training and experience. This achievement is a consequence of the selfless devotion of our senior athletes and the blood and sweat of the newcomers.
Unfortunately, year by year the nation's sports budget has been gradually reduced. This is the result of people judging the caliber of an athlete only by his or her victory or defeat. As a consequence, many sports have shrunk in Taiwan. It's admirable that our archers also accomplished their goals, given that their training ground was nothing more than a parking lot used after-hours.
To encourage the public to participate in sports events and to cultivate outstanding sports talent, we need to use resources appropriately. This is not only a priority for people involved in sports, but is also crucial to the development of a diverse society.
Chen and Chu's hard work have brought the nation before the eyes of the world. How glorious this is! These two gold medals will allow the country to stand proud on the international stage, and have given the nation incomparable assistance in focusing its striving for glory. These two historic gold medals have come just at the right time, for Taiwan really needs a victory. It needs such victories to divert attention from a wearying confrontation, to salve the wounds and grievances of its heart and to rediscover itself.
The images of Chen and Chu winning their medals brought emotions of the Taiwanese masses -- sitting before their televisions late into the night -- to a fever pitch. The strains of the National Flag Song sounded so sweet, and the five-ringed Olympic flag looked beautiful.
This was a moment of enormous pride -- but that pride was mixed with regret. For the flag was not Taiwan's national flag, and the music was not Taiwan's national anthem. Such are the compromises that the country must make in order to participate in international sports. It is not the sort of treatment that a normal nation would expect. Taiwan has to work harder to fight for the same kind of treatment other countries get as part of the international community.
For this Olympics, Taiwan spared neither money nor effort to win international recognition. In the runup to the Olympics, it released advertisements with the slogan "Taiwan on the starting line," but these were removed by the Olympic Committee after pressure from China. Because of the excellent performance of its athletes, the nation was still able to shine at this international sports event -- proving the hard truth that "ability is everything." Taiwan has started the Olympic race, and it will only pick up the pace.
Before 1945, the most widely spoken language in Taiwan was Tai-gi (also known as Taiwanese, Taiwanese Hokkien or Hoklo). However, due to almost a century of language repression policies, many Taiwanese believe that Tai-gi is at risk of disappearing. To understand this crisis, I interviewed academics and activists about Taiwan’s history of language repression, the major challenges of revitalizing Tai-gi and their policy recommendations. Although Taiwanese were pressured to speak Japanese when Taiwan became a Japanese colony in 1895, most managed to keep their heritage languages alive in their homes. However, starting in 1949, when the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) enacted martial law
“Si ambulat loquitur tetrissitatque sicut anas, anas est” is, in customary international law, the three-part test of anatine ambulation, articulation and tetrissitation. And it is essential to Taiwan’s existence. Apocryphally, it can be traced as far back as Suetonius (蘇埃托尼烏斯) in late first-century Rome. Alas, Suetonius was only talking about ducks (anas). But this self-evident principle was codified as a four-part test at the Montevideo Convention in 1934, to which the United States is a party. Article One: “The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: a) a permanent population; b) a defined territory; c) government;
Chinese agents often target Taiwanese officials who are motivated by financial gain rather than ideology, while people who are found guilty of spying face lenient punishments in Taiwan, a researcher said on Tuesday. While the law says that foreign agents can be sentenced to death, people who are convicted of spying for Beijing often serve less than nine months in prison because Taiwan does not formally recognize China as a foreign nation, Institute for National Defense and Security Research fellow Su Tzu-yun (蘇紫雲) said. Many officials and military personnel sell information to China believing it to be of little value, unaware that
The central bank and the US Department of the Treasury on Friday issued a joint statement that both sides agreed to avoid currency manipulation and the use of exchange rates to gain a competitive advantage, and would only intervene in foreign-exchange markets to combat excess volatility and disorderly movements. The central bank also agreed to disclose its foreign-exchange intervention amounts quarterly rather than every six months, starting from next month. It emphasized that the joint statement is unrelated to tariff negotiations between Taipei and Washington, and that the US never requested the appreciation of the New Taiwan dollar during the
RSS