The government has decided to remove a plaque bearing the name “National Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall” from the main building of the hall and would reinstate the “Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall” plaque in July, Minister Without Portfolio Ovid Tseng (曾志朗) said on Thursday.
The decision was made after coordination meetings between different government branches, Tseng said.
As for the inscription on the memorial hall’s entry arch, the Ministry of Education said yesterday it would hold three public forums next month to discuss whether to reinstate the four-character inscription, dazhong zhizheng (大中至正), which means “great neutrality and perfect uprightness.”
Participants at the forums will include academics and experts, while elected representatives and government officials will be excluded from the meetings, the ministry said.
Tseng said the government would not replace the “Liberty Square” inscription at the hall entrance until after gauging public opinion on the matter during the ministry-sponsored forums.
The hall has been the subject of dispute between pan-blues and pan-greens over the years. In 2007, the then-Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration renamed the memorial National Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall as part of its efforts to remove symbols commemorating dictator Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石).
The DPP government also changed the inscription dazhong zhizheng to “Liberty Square” (自由廣場) and redecorated the hall. The move drew protests from the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)-dominated legislature, which blasted the government for failing to put it through a legislative vote.
With the KMT regaining power last year, Premier Liu Chao-shiuan (劉兆玄) in August instructed the Executive Yuan to withdraw from the legislature a proposal to abolish the Organic Statute of Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall (中正紀念堂組織條例).
During the review of the central government’s budget request for the current fiscal year in January, the KMT-controlled legislature passed a resolution stating that “the name of National Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall shall be changed to Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall.”
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS