Two groups yesterday urged the government to crack down on stores that rent comic books, saying that a survey they conducted showed that a vast majority of them allowed youngsters access to pornographic material.
The ROC Publications Appraisal Foundation and the Chinese Children Education Development Association said that 89 percent of the 160 stores in Taipei and Kaohsiung that they surveyed displayed and rented pornographic comic books.
PHOTO: GEORGE TSORNG, TAIPEI TIMES
They said 98 percent displayed "restricted" publications that were suitable only for readers aged 18 and over.
"The sexual, violent and obscene content of comic books and fiction books is increasing and becoming more exaggerated," said Hsu Wen-pin (
Yu Ying-fu (
Those who violate the law could be fined up to NT$500,000 and their businesses closed for up to one year.
"But the law will not be implemented until August as the administrative details have yet to be resolved, " Hsu said.
During the summer vacation, about 68 percent of teenagers read comic books and novels in their spare time, the foundation said.
Hsu said although some comics are marked "restricted," some of them are actually pornography.
"We hope that the idea of grading and classifying books can be implemented soon," said Yang Shou-Jung, dean of the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Soochow University.
"By doing so we can not only protect children and teenagers but also protect the freedom of writers. For the time being we can only rely on the police to crack down on this kind of illegal pornography."
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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