When political ideologies are at the center of a debate on the preservation of a monument, a structure less than three decades old can carry the misleading status of a heritage site worthy of protection.
Such absurdity was in full display on Tuesday when the Taipei City Government's Department of Cultural Affairs announced that it would start the process of deciding whether or not the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall should have the protection afforded an historical site.
The abrupt announcement came soon after the Cabinet's decision that the hall would be renamed "Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall" and the white and blue walls surrounding it demolished.
The urgency of the statement shows the degree of political will the Taipei City Government can demonstrate when trying to protect a structure that was built in 1980.
Since the Cabinet announced its plan last Friday, the city government has left no law in its jurisdiction unturned to save the memorial and its environs. In order to guarantee that the hatchet man of the 228 Incident remains majestically enshrined, the Department of Cultural Affairs first cited the Construction Law (
If this law can be applied to a structure that is younger than Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport, then why did the Taipei City Government insist upon tearing down the Jiancheng Circle (
And some sites on the city government's demolition list are older than that. The government has approved tearing down walls surrounding Talungtung's (
And it is chillingly ironic that the very day the city government made an announcement declaring the CKS Memorial Hall a temporary heritage site, the Department of Rapid Transit Systems issued a notice to the Lo Sheng Sanatorium (
Glancing at the list of enduring landmarks chosen to be destroyed by the city government, it's hard not to notice the stench of cultural prejudice in the air.
Cherry-picking history so that Chiang Kai-shek (
Meanwhile, the birth of democracy in this country remains substantially unmemorialized.
Lee Yong-ping (
If her argument is valid, would it then be acceptable for the Taipei City Government to preserve the walls while letting Chiang's symbolic credibility expire? Probably not.
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
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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
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