Not all of his offhand proposals have met with disaster, but when Tu Cheng-sheng (
A protege of former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝), Tu proved unpopular as head of the Ministry of Education from the start with the pan-blue camp, ruffling their feathers in 2004 with his proposal that Taiwan maps be rotated 90 degrees counter-clockwise in schools nationwide.
With the country's north no longer on top, Tu argued, students could appreciate Taiwan from a fresh, "fairer" angle.
In recent weeks, his critics have compared Tu to US President George W. Bush for his allegedly faulty command of Mandarin.
Notorious for his slips of the tongue, Bush is a model to whom Tu aspires by misquoting and making up Chinese idioms, critics alleged.
Last week, Tu defended his ministry's listing of the phrase "three little pigs" in its online classical idioms dictionary, insisting that the saying -- apparently from the Western fairy tale by the same name -- was indeed a classical Chinese idiom.
"For example, if I saw a student slacking off, I could say to him, `Don't be like the oldest of the three little pigs.' You see, that's an idiom," Tu reportedly said.
Incidentally, in the fairy tale The Three Little Pigs, the oldest pig character outsmarts a villainous wolf by being hardworking.
Tu's allegedly iffy grasp of idioms prompted pan-blue lawmakers to cook up their own "idiom" last week: "To pull a Tu Cheng-sheng," referring to verbal gaffes exposing one's ignorance.
With character-building ranking high on the education ministry's education reform agenda, Tu's ethics-based curricula have also recently met with a string of sex scandals involving teachers.
Still reeling from reports earlier this month that two Kaohsiung high school teachers had raped their students, the ministry was again hit with reports on Thursday, just as news of Tu's son broke, that a Hsinchu elementary school teacher had fondled his pupils. Another Kaohsiung teacher was suspended on Jan. 15 for encouraging his middle school students to drink alcohol.
The latest storm in which Tu was caught was on Thursday after the tabloid newspaper Apple Daily allegedly spotted Tu's 27-year-old son partying with scantily clad escort girls in a private Taipei bar.
Engaging TV reporters in an angry tug of war for their microphones after being asked to comment on the incident, Tu said: "It has nothing to do with me."
For Tu's critics, however, his son Tu Ming-yi's (
"This is a travesty of justice! Tu Ming-yi got off easy because his daddy is a minister," Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lin Yu-fang (
Currently performing mandatory military service, Tu Ming-yi violated servicemen conduct codes by patronizing the bar, defense officials said.
Tu Ming-yi's superior, Political Warfare Brigade Commander Wang Tien-yang (
"Tu Cheng-sheng can't even educate his own son; how is he to improve education nationwide?" KMT Legislator Hung Hsiu-chu (
As a fierce proponent of the "de-Sinicization" of education, Tu enjoys support from pan-green lawmakers, who are now speaking up on behalf of the embattled minister.
"Tu Ming-yi is an adult, and this a family matter," Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Lin Shu-fen (
"Minister Tu should give Tu junior a good spanking, and let that be the end of it," DPP Legislator Wang Sing-nan (
With his meetings canceled following reports that Tu Ming-yi used his father's credit card during his controversial outing, Minister Tu is laying low.
The education head hasn't returned to his office since commandeering eight microphones from a mob of reporters on Thursday, and his ministry has yet to issue a statement on the matter.
When asked for comments yesterday, Premier Su Tseng-chang (
Su said Tu Cheng-sheng had phoned him and told him that he was troubled by his son's problem.
It is understandable how a father would feel given the trouble caused by his son, Su added.
Additional reporting by Jimmy Chuang
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods