Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin’s (郝龍斌) appointment of city officials came into question yesterday after a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) councilor accused the new cultural affairs commissioner of plagiarism and said the city government failed to conduct a solid background check.
Cheng Mei-hua (鄭美華), who took over as head of the Department of Cultural Affairs on Aug. 2, has denied the accusations.
Cheng assumed the post following the resignation of Hsieh Hsiao-yun (謝小醞) in July amid a dispute over an exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. She had worked at the Council for Cultural Affairs and taught at several universities.
Showing copies of several documents, KMT Taipei City Councilor Lee Ching-yuan (李慶元) accused Cheng of copying large sections of her papers that were published in local and international conferences in 2008 and 2009.
Lee alleged that 12 of the 23 pages of Cheng’s English paper titled A Communitarianism Analysis of the Contradictions of Bureaucratic Imperative Co-ordination in Taiwan, published in 2009, were copied from other works.
After these “acts of plagiarism” were exposed by academics, Chinese Culture University rejected her application to serve as an assistant professor at the school last year, Lee alleged.
“Cheng has faced harsh criticism from academics for plagiarism and her reputation has been tarnished because of these ethical violations,” Lee told a press conference. “It’s dangerous for Mayor Hau to make a hasty appointment without having a better understanding of her background.”
Lee alleged that Hau appointed Cheng through the recommendation of former KMT vice chairperson Lin Cheng-chi (林澄枝), a personal friend of Cheng.
Cheng is one of the newly appointed officials after the most recent reshuffle at the city government. Since Hau was re-elected last year, 16 of 37 top-level city officials have left his team.
Cheng dismissed the accusations and said she had filed a lawsuit against two members of the committee that reviews professor’s qualifications at Chinese Culture University who had made the accusations.
She said the two committee members tampered with the drafts of her papers to make “groundless accusations.”
“All the accusations against me of plagiarism are false, and I am a victim of academic slander,” she said.
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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