Activists yesterday panned the Presidential Office over its recent response to a petition from Pingpu Aborigines for official recognition, saying its reply was contradictory.
“I was shocked by the response,” Lin Sheng-yi (林勝義), a descendant of the Pingpu Ketagalan tribe, told the Taipei Times via telephone. “Both President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and [Council of Indigenous Peoples Minister] Sun Ta-chuan [孫大川] received high degrees from abroad; I don’t know why they have so little understanding of human rights.”
Responding to a petition submitted by several Pingpu Aboriginal rights groups after a demonstration last month, the Presidential Office said in a written statement addressed to Lin that it fully supported the Pingpu “in the area of culture and history,” but chose to leave the ethnic recognition issue to one side because it is “very complicated and needs to be dealt with very carefully.”
The Pingpu are an indigenous people who once inhabited most of the plains across the country. Many lost their culture and language over time as a result of their close interaction with Han Chinese immigrants from China.
Most also forfeited official recognition when they failed to “register” their ethnic identity with the government in the 1960s because of administrative failings.
“We Pingpu are an indigenous people, and that is a fact that was recorded by the Spanish, the Dutch, the Qing Chinese and the Japanese, who all ruled over Taiwan,” Lin said. “We’re Aborigines, we’re born with that identity. I don’t know why it’s a complicated issue that needs to be dealt with very carefully.”
“How do you administratively decide someone’s ethnicity?” he asked.
Another Pingpu activist, Jason Pan (潘紀揚), of the Pazeh Tribe, echoed Lin’s ideas.
“The government had no problem recognizing the ethnic identities of other Aborigines, of Tibetans, Mongolians and Hakka — but when it comes to Pingpu Aborigines, it becomes a complicated issue that needs to be further researched, and that requires social consensus,” Pan said. “If we Pingpu do not fight for our own rights, we will eventually become culturally extinct.”
Lin said that the Presidential Office called them “Pingpu” in the letter and admitted that they had their own culture and history, “so how can you say that these people do not exist?”
Taiwanese can file complaints with the Tourism Administration to report travel agencies if their activities caused termination of a person’s citizenship, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said yesterday, after a podcaster highlighted a case in which a person’s citizenship was canceled for receiving a single-use Chinese passport to enter Russia. The council is aware of incidents in which people who signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of Russia were told they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, Chiu told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Taipei. However, the travel agencies actually applied
Japanese footwear brand Onitsuka Tiger today issued a public apology and said it has suspended an employee amid allegations that the staff member discriminated against a Vietnamese customer at its Taipei 101 store. Posting on the social media platform Threads yesterday, a user said that an employee at the store said that “those shoes are very expensive” when her friend, who is a migrant worker from Vietnam, asked for assistance. The employee then ignored her until she asked again, to which she replied: "We don't have a size 37." The post had amassed nearly 26,000 likes and 916 comments as of this
New measures aimed at making Taiwan more attractive to foreign professionals came into effect this month, the National Development Council said yesterday. Among the changes, international students at Taiwanese universities would be able to work in Taiwan without a work permit in the two years after they graduate, explainer materials provided by the council said. In addition, foreign nationals who graduated from one of the world’s top 200 universities within the past five years can also apply for a two-year open work permit. Previously, those graduates would have needed to apply for a work permit using point-based criteria or have a Taiwanese company
The Shilin District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday indicted two Taiwanese and issued a wanted notice for Pete Liu (劉作虎), founder of Shenzhen-based smartphone manufacturer OnePlus Technology Co (萬普拉斯科技), for allegedly contravening the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例) by poaching 70 engineers in Taiwan. Liu allegedly traveled to Taiwan at the end of 2014 and met with a Taiwanese man surnamed Lin (林) to discuss establishing a mobile software research and development (R&D) team in Taiwan, prosecutors said. Without approval from the government, Lin, following Liu’s instructions, recruited more than 70 software
RSS