Raising a red flag
Every year on New Year’s Day, flag-raising ceremonies are held in cities and towns nationwide. However, this year the media reported that a group raised the Chinese Communist Party’s “Five-star Red Flag.”
The instigator of the stunt is Taiwanese. His Facebook personal profile says: “I will forever be Chinese; in death my spirit will be Chinese.”
This is astonishing, but what is particularly strange is that the police issued a statement, saying that to avoid any clashes between different groups, they would dispatch officers to keep the peace.
In Canada, a controversial Chinese flag-raising ceremony took place at Vancouver City Hall on Oct. 3 last year to mark China’s national day. The ceremony attracted heavy criticism, including from the Greater Vancouver Taiwanese-Canadian Association. Several days later, groups affiliated with the association rallied in front of the town hall, waving the Canadian national flag.
Former association chairman Douglas Chiang (江文基) said that Canada always speaks up for democracy, liberty and human rights, and so it is difficult to understand why Vancouver’s mayor would choose to raise China’s flag and lend support to the Chinese government, given the country’s questionable human rights record.
In Taiwan, the raising of China’s national flag is a violation of the National Emblem and National Flag of the Republic of China Act (中華民國國徽國旗法) — it has nothing to do with “free speech.”
Article 19 of the act states that shops and households that display the national flag must conform to rules on size, and manufacturers and shops that produce or sell national emblems or flags that do not conform to the requirements will be prosecuted.
This begs the question, was the Chinese flag-raising ceremony legal? It might be that it is a bad law and that it is therefore difficult to enforce, or perhaps it is out-dated and incompatible with contemporary Taiwan; but if legislators fail to either amend the law or abolish it, then they ought to blush with shame at their slothful ways.
Chang Hui-ho
Taipei
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