Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu (
Taking questions during an impromptu session of the Kaohsiung City Council yesterday, Chen said she decided to move the statue for three reasons: to separate politics from culture; because the authoritarian era has ended and to promote ethnic harmony.
Chen said the 228 Incident in 1947 had done great harm to Taiwanese society and since the authoritarian era had ended, she did not think symbols of the era should continue to exist in Kaohsiung.
PHOTO: HUANG CHIH-YUAN, TAIPEI TIMES
She said removing the statue from the main hall of the city's culture center also meant the main hall could be used as an exhibition venue for art shows.
People who want to commemorate Chiang could visit the Chiang Kai-shek Statue Park in Dashi (
Chen and other city government staff were obliged to report to the City Council yesterday about how the city government handled the removal of the statue on March 12.
In another unscheduled session of the City Council on Monday pan-blue city councilors accused the city government of defacing public property during the removal because the statue of Chiang was cut into 79 pieces.
Deputy Kaohsiung Mayor Chiu Tai-san (
Kaohsiung City Councilor Huang Po-lin (黃柏霖), a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) member, said that the decision to move the statue was made too hastily.
Chen ordered the removal on the night of March 12, after the city government had passed a draft bill that morning to enable it to rename the culture center and to remove symbols of Chiang.
Huang said he would propose a probe into the decision making process and the statue's removal. He said he might sue the city government if it were found to have violated any regulations.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching