A member of the Control Yuan deplored the government's failure to preserve documents relating to important historical figures in modern Taiwanese politics.
In contrast to Taiwan's lack of research into its history, Huang Huang-hsiung (黃煌雄) said China had shown a great interest and spent a lot of research resources on the subject.
Huang warned that if the government didn't start documenting and preserving Taiwanese history, China may become the sole authority on Taiwanese history.
“It would be quite ironic if we have to ask for information about the 228 Incident from academics in China,” he said.
The 228 Incident refers to a massacre that took place in 1947 when Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) troops suppressed a Taiwanese uprising, leaving tens of thousands dead, missing or imprisoned.
Huang made the statement following an investigation into the subject with another Control Yuan member, Ger Yeong-kuang (葛永光).
Citing examples, Huang said that Chiang Wei-shui (蔣渭水), Lin Hsien-tang (林獻堂), Chien Chi (簡吉) Lin Cheng-lu (林呈錄) and Tsai Hui-ju (蔡惠如) worked for the political and social rights of Taiwanese during the Japanese colonial period.
While these people are Taiwanese, documents about them are scattered everywhere and are mostly unknown to the public, Huang said.
In contrast, China has about 30 large institutions specializing in Taiwanese studies, he said, adding that he was very surprised when two Chinese researchers told him they were very familiar with two books that helped shape the Democratic Progressive Party's political agenda in the 1990s — People’s Constitutional Assembly (人民制憲會議實錄) and The Democratic Constitution (民主大憲章實錄) — while most Taiwanese might not even know that these books exist.
Huang suggested the Ministry of Education set up an archive of documents on Taiwanese history and that the Academia Sinica build a center for research on Taiwanese history with full manpower and budget.
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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