Artistic and cultural creativity will get renewed value in government projects if a draft act to develop the creative industries that is being considered by a legislative committee becomes law.
The legislative Education and Culture Committee has reached a consensus on some clauses in the various proposed versions of the draft act, including one that would enable the government to provide more funding for cultural creativity.
The lawmakers agreed that the government should promote the concept that “all cultural creativity has a price” and free cultural creativity from the constraints of rigid budget laws.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Chiang Nai-shin (蔣乃辛) proposed on Monday that government expenditures on creative services or assets with an economic utility of more than two years should be listed as a capital expense rather than as a current expense under budget law.
At present, expenditures reported as current expenses leave little room for services such as “design” that are not tangible or cannot be easily assessed.
Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Kuan Bi-ling (管碧玲) said she supported the idea.
“Cultural activities should carry a price” said Kuan, who served as Kaohsiung’s cultural chief before becoming a lawmaker.
She cited one project where she coordinated the budget of a wall made with artistic tiles in Taipei County in which the government would only calculate the cost of the project based on the price of tiles, but the builder insisted on a higher price because he had paid high design fees to an artist.
Meanwhile, the committee also said it would divide cultural creative industries into 15 sectors — visual arts, music and performing arts, cultural asset applications and exhibition and performing facilities, artifacts, movies, broadcast and television, publication, advertising, product design, visual communication design, brand design, architectural design, digital content, creative life, popular music and cultural content.
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