The Ministry of National Defense yesterday unveiled the nation's first Hokkien-language television commercial for military academy recruitment.
With a male voice-over, the 30-second commercial features several elementary school children dreaming of becoming soldiers when they grow up while playing with wooden toy guns in their schoolyard.
The message the ministry wants to convey through the commercial is that defending the country is the dream of every citizen and that by joining the military, citizens can realize that dream.
The commercial was shown to the public for the first time yesterday at a regular ministry press conference. It has not yet aired on television.
The TV spot is the first of its kind in Hokkien. Commercials of the same vein have previously been in Mandarin and one was even in English.
The commercial created a stir at KMT-affiliated radio stations and newspapers, with several reporters asking if the new ad means that Hokkien is to be the dominant language of the military.
Some also asked whether commercials in Hakka and other languages should also be created in the interest of fairness.
In response, Colonel Chiu Chao-li (
"We decided to use Hokkien mainly because we want the commercial to be more acceptable to a majority of people on the island," Chiu said.
Ministry spokesman Major General Huang Sui-sheng (黃穗生) did say, however, that the military would consider the suggestion of using other languages in future cadet-recruitment commercials.
Meanwhile, the ministry announced that the number of people applying for admission into one of the nation's military academies reached a record high of 3,288 this year, six times the number of applicants who applied last year.
Colonel Chiu said the new freshman class is the best the military has seen.
"Most of these admitted applicants have outstanding academic records, on par with those of students being accepted to state universities in the civilian sector," Chiu said.
The development suggests that the previous trend of only students with poor grades applying to military academies could be changing.
"The military is buying into increasingly high-tech weaponry. The type of personnel we need in the future has to be academically well-trained," Chiu said.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching