RTI deserves recognition
Once its house is in order, President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) administration should turn its attention to the remarkable improvement of Radio Taiwan International’s (RTI) programming — whose announcers are winning multiple Golden Bell radio excellence awards annually — as well as its Web site design, and begin promoting it as a source of commercial-free English.
RTI’s all-English programs could be used to inform the English-speaking expat community if it were more widely accessible.
Taiwan’s other sometimes-English media — International Community Radio Taipei (ICRT) — was established in the 1970s under the Taipei International Community Cultural Foundation, an organization run by pro-Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) China Trust employees after then-US president Jimmy Carter withdrew US military forces from Taiwan, taking with them the excellent free English-language radio station (AFRT) my wife’s generation had grown up listening to.
Twenty years ago Taiwan had three TV stations and ICRT acted as a bridge between Western and Taiwanese cultures. That bridge was no longer needed when the Internet arrived.
Under the direction of its China Trust board of directors, ICRT responded to its sudden irrelevance by copying Mandarin-language radio stations, switched from all-English to bilingual programs while still claiming to be “Taiwan’s only English radio station.” In an article in the Taipei Times, an ICRT employee admitted current employees do not listen to the station (“Remaining relevant: the challenge of radio,” March 23, page 12).
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration supported China Trust by throwing money at ICRT via a program called Let’s Learn Hakka, while ignoring the needs of young Taiwanese for a free source of native speakers conversing in English to prepare them to compete against students in Singapore, South Korea and China.
Tsai should instruct the Ministry of Education to promote RTI to all English-language teachers as a free resource.
I offer a suggestion to RTI. Its current Web site lacks a free-to-use community event bulletin board with listings of leisure items, such as movie reviews and restaurant reviews. It is time the Tsai administration acted on the fact that KMT bankers have ruined ICRT while RTI has improved tremendously.
Dan Fowler
Taoyuan and Toronto
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Among the many challenges new President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) faces, let her not forget the plight of many Aboriginal communities across Taiwan. Many are battling to save their land from the government, who is buying it up on the pretense of building reservoirs and moving toward eco-friendly energy sources. Hunting rights are also being violated, most notably in the case of Tama Talum, who was sent to prison for catching his dinner. I hope Tsai will address these issues and consider political autonomy for Aboriginal areas in the south and east, which will allow for better protection of Aboriginal land, livelihoods and language.
Oliver Drewett
Kaohsiung
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