The US was not opposed to Taiwan establishing “Taiwan Academies” in the US as part of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office (TECRO), and would be happy to work with Taipei to materialize the plan, the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) said yesterday.
“We actually do not oppose [Taiwan Academies]. There are some technical and legal rules that needed to be made. The AIT is willing to work with the Taiwan government in order to help them meet the rules,” AIT spokesperson Sheila Paskman said when reached by telephone.
Paskman made the remarks when asked to comment on a story yesterday in the Chinese-language United Daily News (UDN) that said President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) campaign pledge to set up the institutions abroad hit a snag in the US, with US authorities reportedly telling Taipei that teaching a language is not a cultural activity and that Taiwan’s representative offices in the US and its territories are not eligible to sponsor such courses.
According to Council for -Cultural Affairs Deputy Minister Lee Jen-fang (李仁芳), whose agency is in charge of the project, the purpose of the Taiwan Academies is to provide opportunities for people to learn about traditional Chinese characters and to promote Chinese classics and Chinese culture with Taiwanese characteristics.
In a letter sent from AIT’s Washington headquarters to TECRO, the US “pointed out things that needed to be discussed,” Paskman said.
However, even in the letter, “we never said we opposed it,” she said.
“So we are definitely in favor of it and we are happy to work with Taiwan to deal with the issues involved in it,” Paskman added, but she declined to go into specifics as “it was a private letter.”
In response to the United Daily report, government officials were optimistic that the US would approve of the plan after some issues regarding the nature of the institutions were clarified.
“There was a misunderstanding that the US thought we planned to run [Chinese-language] classes that charged fees, but that was never the plan,” Minister Without Portfolio Ovid Tseng (曾志朗) said.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Department of North American Affairs Director-General Bruce Linghu (令狐榮達) said the US did not consider it a problem to establish the Taiwan Academies as part of TECRO, except for the concern that the academies would have profit-making language courses.
After negotiation, Taipei and Washington have come to an understanding that the Taiwan Academies will only offer training classes for teachers of Mandarin, and not language classes, Overseas Compatriot Affairs Commission Deputy Minister Jen Hong (任弘) said.
Taiwan can still cooperate with private language-learning institutes to promote the teaching and use of traditional Chinese characters by having the institutes issue certificates in conjunction with the Taiwan Academies, Jen said.
Paskman confirmed that whether TECRO is able to open fee--charging Chinese-language courses at Taiwan Academies was one of the issues that the US had brought up in the letter, but added that “there is something we need to investigate more.”
Ma devised the Taiwan Academy project to counter the Confucius Institutes that China established and has developed heavily around the world in recent years to promote Chinese language and culture, and support Chinese teachers internationally.
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