President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday promised to provide more resources for physical education after the nation’s Olympic team won four medals at the Games in Beijing.
Ma said there was much room for improvement in the country’s physical education, adding that there was too much money invested in educating the mind and not enough in educating the body.
“We know there is not enough money [for physical education], and we are working on it,” he said. “We will adjust the allocation of resources to allow more resources to come in.”
Ma made the remarks while receiving members of the nation’s Olympic team at the Presidential Office yesterday morning. The team won four bronze medals, two each in taekwondo and weightlifting.
Ma said there might be a gap between the result and public expectations for the team’s performance, but he thought the team did a good job in implementing the Olympic spirit. He expressed regret that he did not get to see the members of the baseball team yesterday, but he complimented the individual performances of certain players.
Ma, an avid jogger, said he loved sports and liked to exercise. He said he would like to see the nation pay more attention to competitive sports and develop the habit of exercising. Regular exercise could help remedy depression and obesity, he said, adding that investing more money in physical education was worth it.
During his two terms as Taipei mayor, Ma said the construction of the mass rapid transit system took up the lion’s share of the city’s budget, followed by education. The city spent the most of its education budget on physical education, he said.
Although the city saw negative growth in its annual budget for five years, Ma said he managed to build or reconstruct 80 swimming pools and six community sports centers.
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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