Hong Kong’s government yesterday backed down on a plan to force children to take Chinese patriotism classes, after thousands took to the streets in protest ahead of legislative polls.
Organizers said 120,000 protesters rallied outside the government headquarters late on Friday, but police put the number at 36,000, a marked escalation in demonstrations which have waxed and waned for 10 straight days.
The protests began in July when tens of thousands demonstrated against what they say is a Bejing-imposed policy to brainwash children with Chinese Communist Party propaganda. Since then the demonstrators have become a daily feature at the executive building and a major headache for the pro-Beijing government leading up to today’s elections for Hong Kong’s Legislative Assembly.
Photo: AFP
Some protesters staged hunger strikes and students had erected a replica of the democracy statue that symbolized the student-led 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in China.
The city’s Beijing-backed leader, Hong Kong Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying (梁振英), had rejected demands to meet the students, saying he would not negotiate the withdrawal of the policy he inherited from the previous government in July.
However, in a dramatic about-face on the eve of the election, Leung held a press conference late yesterday to say the mandatory aspect of the policy had been scrapped.
“The amendment of this policy means that we are giving the authority to the schools,” Leung said, dropping the 2016 deadline for the curriculum to be taught in all primary and secondary schools. “The schools are given the authority to decide when and how they would like to introduce the moral and national education.”
Leung also promised to re-examine the entire curriculum in the light of the public outcry.
The government, formed after a small group of largely pro-Beijing elites appointed Leung earlier this year, had insisted the subject was important to foster a sense of national belonging and identity.
Government-funded course material extolled the benefits of one-party rule, equated multi-party democracy to chaos and glossed over events like the mass starvation of former Chinese leader Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東 ) regime.
The administration now appears to have caved in to public opposition amid rising anti-Beijing sentiment in the semi-autonomous city, which enjoys a degree of democracy and freedom not allowed in mainland China.
Lawmaker Anna Wu, who chairs a government committee studying the policy, said the authorities decided on a course of action that was “the most inclusive and most liberal.”
The new 70-seat legislature elected today will pave the way for full suffrage, which Beijing has promised in 2017 for Leung’s job as chief executive and by 2020 for the parliament.
Pro-democracy parties were using the education furore to galvanize their supporters, hoping to boost their representation in parliament and maintain a veto over constitutional amendments.
Just over half of the incoming legislature will be directly elected, with the remainder chosen by relatively small “functional constituencies” organized along professional and sectoral lines and generally loyal to Beijing.
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has