Experts disagreed over the merits of the affirmative action program for Aborigines and their right to self-determination at a symposium organized by the Chinese Association of Human Rights yesterday.
James Hsueh, (薛承泰), a professor of Sociology at National Taiwan University and director of the Taipei City Government's Department of Social Welfare, questioned whether the government's affirmative action program was the best means of assisting Aboriginal students.
"There are two different kinds of marginalization. There is economic marginalization and then there is the other kind," he said.
"I grew up economically marginalized, but I never thought of myself as being truly marginalized. We students from Kinmen never mentioned our backgrounds. It helped us overcome our marginalized status," Hsueh said.
Hsueh suggested that his underprivileged upbringing in Kinmen shared commonalities with the Aboriginal experience.
"When you control for economic background and regional factors, the achievement gap between aborigines and Han chinese people is not that great. Whether or not the affirmative action measures should be expanded or allowed to remain is a subject that is worthy of discussion," said Hsieh, adding that he was speaking in his capacity as an academic.
Liao Yuan-hao (
"Surely, when a society makes a minority ashamed to mention their identity, the fault lies with the society, rather than the minority," Liao said.
"It's true that self-reliance is important, but the mainstream view that all Aborigines need to do is to shut up and buck up is a one-sided view of the issue," he said.
"We've come a long way since the days of calling them `mountain compatriots' [shanbao
"They're wiling to set up foundations for Aborigines, but they won't fully enforce the anti-discrimination laws that are on the books. I've been told that discrimination is a cultural matter and that you can't legislate culture. But law is a part of our culture. If it were not for the civil rights movement in the 1960s, black people would still be called `niggers' in America," Liao said.
Lu Ya-li (
However, Yang Jen-huang (
"Before colonization, Aborigines organized themselves into tribes of no more than 5,000. We are perfectly capable of regulating ourselves. We will never achieve any meaningful progress until we are allowed to do so," he 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:
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