Once again this week, Taiwanese demonstrated they will not remain silent in the face of injustice or when the values they hold dear, and for which their forebears fought with blood and sweat, are threatened.
Only a week after hundreds of young Taiwanese demonstrated in the streets of London following the removal, at Beijing’s request, of the Republic of China flag on Regent Street, a handful of reporters and editors at the Chinese-language China Times risked sacrificing their careers in journalism to protest against the unethical practices of their employer.
At the heart of the issue is the bid by the Want Want China Times Group, the parent company of the China Times, to acquire 11 cable TV services operated by China Network Systems (CNS). After months of deliberation, the National Communications Commission (NCC) announced its approval of the deal last month, albeit under strict conditions.
In the lead-up to the decision, a number of organizations and media experts raised issues with the merger, saying it would not only create a “media giant,” but one whose owner, Tsai Eng-meng (蔡衍明), has often put on moral blinders to protect his corporate interests in China. Critics have said that since 2008, when Tsai acquired the China Times Group, the newspaper has repeatedly engaged in self-censorship to ensure its reporting did not “offend” Beijing — a deplorable tradition that has several precedents in Hong Kong since retrocession in 1997.
In addition to remaining silent about China’s poor human rights conditions, Tsai has shown no compunction about using his media outlets to launch personal attacks on his critics, from academics, students and NCC commissioners who opposed the CNS deal, to a Hong Kong-based Pulitzer Prize-wining reporter who interviewed him earlier this year — the infamous interview in which Tsai denied the events on June 4, 1989, in Tiananmen Square, constituted a massacre.
After the China Times’ dalliance with “embedded” government advertising led Dennis Huang (黃哲斌), one of its senior reporters, to resign in 2010, the newspaper more recently launched what can only be described as vitriolic attacks against Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌), an academic and outspoken critic of the CNS bid.
It has since emerged that some reporters whose bylines accompanied the articles attacking the academic had little say over the content of their articles and that the published stories bore little resemblance to the copy they had submitted. Outraged by such practices, a number of reporters and editors — one with less than two years’ experience, others with more than two decades — resigned or requested retirement in protest, choosing principle over personal comfort at a time when employment opportunities in the newspaper business are few and far between.
Of course, such acts of selflessness cannot in and of themselves prevent media giants from pursuing their agendas, and the resignations are unlikely to convince Tsai, Taiwan’s wealthiest individual, to clean up his act. However, just like the flag controversy in London, those individual protests do not go unnoticed and serve to highlight the predicament in which Taiwan finds itself as its government strives for ever-closer relations with authoritarian China. Not only did Dennis Huang’s resignation make headlines, it became one of the cases used by Freedom House to justify Taiwan’s lower ranking in its press freedom report the following year. Similarly, Tsai’s use of his media outlets as a personal tool for his vindictiveness, along with the resignations that followed, will also not go unnoticed.
In the name of freedom of the press and the values that Taiwanese stand for, the Taipei Times salutes the China Times editors and journalists who made personal sacrifices to expose injustice and chose to leave rather than be complicit in journalism of the worst kind.
The government and local industries breathed a sigh of relief after Shin Kong Life Insurance Co last week said it would relinquish surface rights for two plots in Taipei’s Beitou District (北投) to Nvidia Corp. The US chip-design giant’s plan to expand its local presence will be crucial for Taiwan to safeguard its core role in the global artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem and to advance the nation’s AI development. The land in dispute is owned by the Taipei City Government, which in 2021 sold the rights to develop and use the two plots of land, codenamed T17 and T18, to the
Taiwan’s first case of African swine fever (ASF) was confirmed on Tuesday evening at a hog farm in Taichung’s Wuci District (梧棲), trigging nationwide emergency measures and stripping Taiwan of its status as the only Asian country free of classical swine fever, ASF and foot-and-mouth disease, a certification it received on May 29. The government on Wednesday set up a Central Emergency Operations Center in Taichung and instituted an immediate five-day ban on transporting and slaughtering hogs, and on feeding pigs kitchen waste. The ban was later extended to 15 days, to account for the incubation period of the virus
The ceasefire in the Middle East is a rare cause for celebration in that war-torn region. Hamas has released all of the living hostages it captured on Oct. 7, 2023, regular combat operations have ceased, and Israel has drawn closer to its Arab neighbors. Israel, with crucial support from the United States, has achieved all of this despite concerted efforts from the forces of darkness to prevent it. Hamas, of course, is a longtime client of Iran, which in turn is a client of China. Two years ago, when Hamas invaded Israel — killing 1,200, kidnapping 251, and brutalizing countless others
Art and cultural events are key for a city’s cultivation of soft power and international image, and how politicians engage with them often defines their success. Representative to Austria Liu Suan-yung’s (劉玄詠) conducting performance and Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen’s (盧秀燕) show of drumming and the Tainan Jazz Festival demonstrate different outcomes when politics meet culture. While a thoughtful and professional engagement can heighten an event’s status and cultural value, indulging in political theater runs the risk of undermining trust and its reception. During a National Day reception celebration in Austria on Oct. 8, Liu, who was formerly director of the
RSS