Rather than bow to pressure, Chin Heng-wei (
Chin, a political observer and editor in chief of Contemporary Monthly magazine, was attacked by a man thought to be in his 60s, whom Chin said may have been a military veteran, while on his way home with his wife.
On Wednesday, KMT Legislator Hung Hsiu-chu (
TAIPEI TIMES FILE PHOTO
"The KMT wants to block me from taking part in talk shows. To thwart this attack, I am accepting all invitations from the media," Chin said.
"I don't deserve a political party using its all force to attack me," he said, adding that the KMT's attacks served to upgrade his status.
"Accusing me of being a manipulator on behalf of the DPP is just a pathetic gimmick that the KMT has played to combat intellectuals in Taiwan," he said.
Reacting to the two incidents, Chin reiterated that he has no reason to compromise, especially since he has fought for freedom of speech since the martial law era.
In 1983, Chin, as editor of the China Times, challenged the authorities by publishing controversial social criticism, including Lung Ying-tai's (
Lung is a former director of the Taipei City Government's Cultural Affairs Bureau.
Many social historians now mark Wild Fire as one of the starting points of the cascade of events that transformed Taiwan into one of the most democratic countries in Asia.
"Without the China Times insistence, there would have been no Wild Fires," Lung said.
"Chin asked me to write freely and not to consider the [pressure from] Taiwan Garrison Command. He always said that he would take care of the censorship issue," she said, adding that her father once had nightmares about her columns.
Ironically, Chin was replaced by the China Times due to pressure from the Taiwan Garrison Command.
In June 1986, Chin founded Contemporary Monthly, which is considered one of Taiwan's few liberal and intellectual magazines.
The magazine has published stories on issues such as Marxism, literature, film, history, liberalism and the environment in its 187 editions.
As a political observer, Chin has written columns for Liberty Times and the Taiwan Daily News since 1988.
"He is one of the few people capable of writing a good column everyday. Aside from that, he even has time to attend TV call-in shows," said Lu Shih-xiang (盧世祥), founder of the Foundation for the Advancement of Media Excellence (新聞公害防治基金會) and a retired editor in chief of the Eco-nomic Daily News. Lu has known Chin since the 1980s.
Chin, whose ancestors came from Zheijiang Province in China, has been one of the few mainlanders to publicly support Taiwan independence, through his columns and his appearances on TV call-in shows.
Chang Mau-kuei (
Chang said Chin's ethnicity would make it difficult for him to mix with Taiwan independence supporters, while his beliefs also alienate him from most mainlanders.
Ku Chung-hwa (
"I think he is brave by taking those risks to express what he really thinks," Ku said.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS