The Nan Ying International Folklore Festival, part of the 2005 Formosa Arts Festival will be held in Tainan County from Oct. 1 to 16, the Council for Cultural Affairs and the Tainan County Government said yesterday.
Groups from 10 countries, including Germany, New Zealand, South Korea, Nepal, Russia and Senegal have been invited to join their Taiwanese counterparts in the folklore festival.
The Tainan County Government sponsored the first Nan Ying festival in 1996 -- the first time such a big festival was organized by a local-level government.
Council for Cultural Affairs Minister Chen Chi-nan (陳其南) said the Nan Ying festival was "bringing globalization to Tainan" and promoting cultural exchange.
This year, 50 families have volunteered to be "friendship families" and host foreign participants. Forty schools will be "friendship schools," allowing the young foreign performers to observe classes. Students from Fu Jen Catholic University will be "friendship ambassadors," serving as guides for the performers.
"The friendship families, schools and ambassadors are all volunteers," Tainan County Commissioner Su Huan-chih (蘇煥智) said. "But they are willing to participate because they hope that these groups will take what they learned about Taiwanese culture back to their home countries."
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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