Taiwan in Time: Jan. 9 to Jan. 16
It was a long shot, but Taiwan could have had its first female president as early as 1996. As the country prepared to hold its first direct presidential election, writer and women’s rights activist Shih Chi-ching (施寄青) put her name in the hat with another female, Wu Yue-chen (吳月珍), as her vice president.
When her application was denied because she didn’t meet the required number of election endorsements, Shih repeatedly protested to the Executive Yuan and finally took the case to the Council of Grand Justices.
Photo: Tsung Chang-chin, Taipei Times
She argued that along with the NT$1 million endorsement deposit and the NT$15 million election deposit, such restrictive measures were against the people’s constitutional right to run for public office, and were unfair to independent candidates who did not have party backing. She added that such measures favor the wealthy and “limits those who have been fighting for women’s rights for decades and truly want to serve the people and be the voice of the disadvantaged.”
“This only strips the rights of people from disadvantaged groups who want to run for office,” she added. Her case was rejected.
Political aspirations aside, Shih was quite an outspoken and often controversial figure, once stating that she had been a male fighter of justice in all her past lives, and only ended up as a woman in this life.
Photo: Wei Chia-chih, Taipei Times
Even at age 60, she appeared in a swimsuit to promote her book Challenging Venus (挑戰維納斯), detailing how she was able to lose 17kg without harming her body.
But of course, dieting was not the main subject of any of her previous books. Instead of challenging Venus, she began her career by challenging the patriarchy.
Following her divorce, she formed the Warm Life Association for Women in 1988 (晚晴協會) to help other divorced women. A year later she published her first book, Having Been Married (走過婚姻), which tackled a sensitive subject at a time when Taiwan’s divorce rate was beginning its rapid increase.
“I’m among the first generation of women who escaped the shackles of childbirth, were widely educated and, most importantly, could support ourselves,” she writes in the introduction as her rationale for publishing the book.
“Therefore, we are the first generation that can make our own decisions on our emotions and bodies. The experiences of our mothers and grandmothers are not applicable to us,” Shih writes.
Obviously the book made her a target for criticism, as she writes in the introduction of her next book Marriage Terminator (婚姻終結者).
“Many people seem to think that Taiwan’s increasing divorce rate is because of people like Shih Chi-ching declaring that women should be independent and leave the family.”
Such was Taiwan’s social climate back then. While Shih denies that she encouraged people to get divorced, she hoped to promote healthy views on the issue since divorce was becoming more prevalent.
“People are often unable to see this issue from a pragmatic and balanced angle,” she writes. “Divorcees like me are often misunderstood and rarely acknowledged.”
Some called her a monster, others called her a savior, and during this time she earned the moniker “Divorce Queen (離婚教主).”
She continues in the book that while society thinks it’s reasonable to oppose the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) 40-year dictatorship, they don’t feel the same about women challenging the several-thousand year patriarchy.
“The equality and democracy they know only applies to politics and men, and women are excluded from the conversation,” she writes.
Written in 1993, this sentiment probably foreshadowed her bid for the presidency three years later.
She later published two books on gender equality aimed at teenagers, but most of her later work focused on the occult, featuring psychics and past lives — including her final book, which is a supernatural autobiography published posthumously after she died on Jan. 13, 2015.
Taiwan in Time, a column about Taiwan’s history that is published every Sunday, spotlights important or interesting events around the nation that have anniversaries this week.
Ajay Verma, a consultant gastroenterologist at Kettering general hospital in Northamptonshire, says our gut is a “complex machine.” “It is constantly providing us with the nutrition we need, initially to grow and develop, and then for us to survive, thrive and repair from injury and illness.” How can we keep it functioning well? Put simply: “Make sure what you put into it is balanced, and that you clear out its waste products adequately,” Verma says. “In a general gastroenterology clinic, the most common conditions we see are irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), gastroesophageal reflux disease, inflammatory bowel disease and constipation,” says Nisha
And so, in the wake of US President Donald Trump’s trip to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), all the experts on the Strait of Hormuz suddenly became experts on US-China-Taiwan relations. The Internet has certainly expanded human knowledge. Lots of these sudden experts made noise this week about Trump’s words after the meeting with PRC dictator Xi Jin-ping (習近平). Trump is going to sell out Taiwan! Longtime Taiwan commentator J. Michael Cole summed the situation up neatly in the Guardian: “We need to keep in mind that he has a tendency to say many things — sometimes contradicting himself within
Last week US President Donald Trump was asked by a reporter whether he would speak on the phone to the President of Taiwan. “l’ll speak to him. I speak to everybody. We have that situation very well in hand,” Trump said. This marked the second time in a couple of weeks he had said he would talk to the President of Taiwan. In 2016 he famously took a call from then-president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), when he was president-elect. Despite warnings that the apocalypse was nigh because of a phone call, the world quickly forgot about the conversation between two democratically-elected presidents.
May 25 to May 31 Few believed that apples could be cultivated on a commercial scale in Taiwan’s high mountains. When horticulturalist Cheng Chao-hsiung (程兆熊) first proposed the idea in 1955, both American and Taiwanese colleagues dismissed it as implausible, arguing that temperate fruit could not be reliably grown on a subtropical island, especially on rugged terrain. However, it was this terrain in the Central Mountain Range where many Chinese Civil War veterans were resettled in the late 1950s. With limited job prospects and no family in Taiwan, they were placed on cooperative farms aimed toward self-sufficiency. Some say the conditions
RSS