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?”
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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:
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
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