Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday proposed forming a language and cultural academy to counter the impact of China's Confucius Academy.
The Confucius Academy is run along the lines of the Alliance Francais, the British Council and the Goethe Institute. It provides Chinese-language instruction and serves as a cultural ambassador for Beijing. It has branches in Germany, Sweden, Australia, the UK and many other countries.
Ma said that if he is elected president, he will launch an NT$5 billion (US$159.74 million) cultural diplomacy fund to boost the country's profile and make culture the center of the government's "soft power."
Ma said he would also establish the Taiwanese equivalent of the Nobel Prize for literature for Chinese-language writers around the world and provide pensions to artists.
He made the remarks at a meeting with 13 prominent stage and cultural figures, including Performance Workshop (表演工作坊) founder and director Stan Lai (
Ma said his promises were not just "campaign talk" and he would deliver on them.
Ma's Democratic Progressive Party rival Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) pledged on Wednesday that he would increase the budget for cultural affairs if elected from 1.3 percent of GDP to 5 percent. That would boost the budget from NT$20 billion to between NT$70 billion and NT$80 billion, he said.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
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,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift