Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Kuan Bi-ling (管碧玲) yesterday accused the Council for Cultural Affairs of overemphasizing cross-strait cultural exchanges while ignoring international ones.
During a question-and-answer session with Council for Cultural Affairs Minister Emile Sheng (盛治仁) at the legislature’s Education and Culture Committee, Kuan said the council’s budget for cross-strait cultural exchanges last year grew 2.2 times from the previous year, while the budget for promotion of international cultural exchanges only increased 24.6 percent.
For this year, the budget for cross-strait exchanges rose 1.3 times, while that for global affairs only climbed 25.5 percent, she said.
BUILDING IMAGE
“Every country is trying to build up its image through international cultural exchanges. These countries clearly know what their objectives are, but [the Taiwanese government] only wants [foreigners] to get to know Taiwan” without really understanding it, Kuan said.
Kuan said the council’s international cultural exchange policy should focus on promoting Taiwanese culture in the international arena to fight China’s attempts to annex the country by claiming that Taiwanese culture is part of Chinese culture.
LANGUAGE ACADEMIES
Meanwhile, Sheng said the council plans to establish two Taiwan Language Academy branches in Los Angeles and Houston next month.
Establishing Taiwan Language Academies abroad to compete with China’s Confucius Language Academies for learners of Mandarin was one of President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) campaign promises.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱) expressed concern over the council’s small NT$20 million (US$636,000) budget, however.
TRADITIONAL EDGE
Hung asked how the proposed Taiwan Language Academy would be able to compete with its Chinese counterpart, which has already established 282 branches of the Confucius Language Academy in 88 countries and recruited more than 230,000 students since 2004.
The minister acknowledged the difficulty, but said that the council hoped to capitalize on the Taiwan Language Academy’s competitive edge — as a place where people can learn about classical Chinese culture and traditional Chinese characters.
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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