A birth certificate purporting to show that the Republic of China’s (ROC) founding father was born in the US will be put on display tomorrow in Taipei, the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) said yesterday.
The document, issued on March 14, 1904, says that Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙) was born on Oahu Island, Hawaii, on Nov. 24, 1870.
It enabled him to travel from Hawaii on April 7, 1904, to San Francisco as a US citizen while the Qing Dynasty issued a warrant for his arrest for attempting to overthrow the government.
The birth certificate, obtained from the US Immigration Office, will be a copy of the original file, said Sheila Paskman, spokesperson for the AIT, which represents US interests in Taiwan in the absence of formal diplomatic ties.
Asked whether this was the first time the document was revealed, Paskman said no and that “it has been around for a while.”
The birth certificate contradicts the generally accepted fact among historians that Sun was born on Nov. 12, 1866, in Cuiheng Village, Xiangshan County, in China’s Guangdong Province.
Many believe Sun’s friends helped him secure a fake birth certificate to facilitate his pursuit of US citizenship, which they felt was a necessary asset for Sun’s promotion of his revolutionary work in China.
Regarding the fake document controversy, Paskman said that US officials at the time held immigration hearings on Sun’s case. Documents from that hearing will also be displayed, allowing the public to judge the document’s authenticity for themselves.
The special exhibition, held to celebrate US Independence Day and the ROC’s centenary, will take place at the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall from tomorrow through July 30.
A survey of young Taiwanese showed that only 36.5 percent of men and 19.6 percent of women believe marriage is important, a trend that academics say is key to the nation’s low birthrate. Yang Wen-shan (楊文山), an adjunct research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Sociology, yesterday announced the 12th round of results from a longitudinal survey of attitudes among young Taiwanese toward markers of adulthood. While few of the respondents, who were aged 28 to 32 when surveyed in 2017, found marriage to be important, 95.8 percent believed that being responsible for oneself should take precedence, data showed. Economic independence came in
SHRINKING FEMALE POPULATION: Last year, 107.74 boys were born for every 100 girls in Taiwan, which is a greater gender imbalance than in Japan and South Korea The Ministry of the Interior recorded 9,601 births in January, the first time the nation has produced fewer than 10,000 newborns in a single month, while different indicators showed that Taiwan might also be facing a population with increasingly fewer births, women and marriages. It comes after the ministry reported a record low 165,249 births last year, which was lower than the 173,156 deaths recorded last year. The nation experienced negative population growth for the first time last year, ministry data found. The number of births in January also dropped from a year earlier, when there were 12,510 births. In February, there were
The Hualien District Prosecutors’ Office has listed six people as suspects in a judicial investigation into a fatal train crash on Friday last week. Fifty people were killed and more than 200 were injured when the Taroko Express No. 408 train slammed into a crane truck that had slid onto the tracks near the entrance of Cingshuei Tunnel (清水隧道) in Hualien’s Sioulin Township (秀林). The office also summoned six officials at the Taiwan Railways Administration’s (TRA) Hualien Engineering Section for questioning about alleged illegal business operations and unsafe work conditions by Yi Hsiang Industry Co and Tung Hsin Construction Co, the two
KEEPING FOCUSED: Premier Su Tseng-chang was said to have commended Minister of Transportation and Communications Lin Chia-lung, but said the tragedy takes priority Minister of Transportation and Communications Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) has submitted a verbal resignation in the wake of the Taroko Express No. 408 train crash two days ago, Executive Yuan spokesman Lo Ping-cheng (羅秉成) said yesterday. In a call, Lin told Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) that he wished to step down, to take responsibility for the deadliest accident involving a Taiwan Railways Administration (TRA) train in 40 years. As of press time last night, the Hualien District Prosecutors’ Office had revised the death toll from 51, which had been reported on the previous day, to 50, after DNA testing showed that what had
RSS