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.
There is a modern roadway stretching from central Hargeisa, the capital of Somaliland in the Horn of Africa, to the partially recognized state’s Egal International Airport. Emblazoned on a gold plaque marking the road’s inauguration in July last year, just below the flags of Somaliland and the Republic of China (ROC), is the road’s official name: “Taiwan Avenue.” The first phase of construction of the upgraded road, with new sidewalks and a modern drainage system to reduce flooding, was 70 percent funded by Taipei, which contributed US$1.85 million. That is a relatively modest sum for the effect on international perception, and
At the end of last year, a diplomatic development with consequences reaching well beyond the regional level emerged. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared Israel’s recognition of Somaliland as a sovereign state, paving the way for political, economic and strategic cooperation with the African nation. The diplomatic breakthrough yields, above all, substantial and tangible benefits for the two countries, enhancing Somaliland’s international posture, with a state prepared to champion its bid for broader legitimacy. With Israel’s support, Somaliland might also benefit from the expertise of Israeli companies in fields such as mineral exploration and water management, as underscored by Israeli Minister of
When former president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) first took office in 2016, she set ambitious goals for remaking the energy mix in Taiwan. At the core of this effort was a significant expansion of the percentage of renewable energy generated to keep pace with growing domestic and global demands to reduce emissions. This effort met with broad bipartisan support as all three major parties placed expanding renewable energy at the center of their energy platforms. However, over the past several years partisanship has become a major headwind in realizing a set of energy goals that all three parties profess to want. Tsai
An elderly mother and her daughter were found dead in Kaohsiung after having not been seen for several days, discovered only when a foul odor began to spread and drew neighbors’ attention. There have been many similar cases, but it is particularly troubling that some of the victims were excluded from the social welfare safety net because they did not meet eligibility criteria. According to media reports, the middle-aged daughter had sought help from the local borough warden. Although the warden did step in, many services were unavailable without out-of-pocket payments due to issues with eligibility, leaving the warden’s hands
RSS