Minister of Education Huang Jong-tsun (黃榮村) yesterday stated his view on the contentious Mandarin-romanization issue for the first time. In general, he said, he favored the opinion of proponents of the Tongyong (通用拼音) system.
Huang said that the technical aspects of the decision would be easy, since 85 percent of the Tongyong and Hanyu (
Leaving the door open to reversing himself, however, he said that if the public did not agree with the future decisions of the Ministry of Education, then the ministry wouldn't want to "play any more."
He said that it is unfair that the decision is the education ministry's alone, given that the opinions on this issue still differ greatly between various groups in society, and that the issue would have to be discussed one more time.
During interpellation in the legislature, lawmakers Diane Lee (李慶安) and Lee Ming-hsien (李明憲) pointed out that the issue has dragged on for a very long time without a decision. They also said that it had gone so far that the previous minister of education, Ovid Tzeng (曾製朗), had been forced to leave his position due to his support for the Hanyu system.
They went on to say that with compulsory native language education about to be implemented in the school system, the government should not delay a final decision further.
To this, Huang replied that the original issue had become blurred due to the huge number of memoranda being sent back and forth between the ministry and the Cabinet. He said he would therefore settle the issue by setting internationalization, language expertise and ethnic-suitability standards, according to which an evaluation of the issue would be carried out.
He also said that he wanted an expert language section of the National Science Council to handle the evaluation, which he said would take two months. Once completed, he said the results would be made public "in the blink of an eye."
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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