A campaign calling for the reform of cultural policies would not stop just because the resignation of Council for Cultural Affairs (CCA) Minister Emile Sheng (盛治仁) has been accepted, Hung Hung (鴻鴻), a theater director and an initiator of the drive, said yesterday.
Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) yesterday said he approved Sheng’s resignation on Thursday night amid accusations of extravagant spending on a musical that was produced for the country’s Double Ten National Day.
The musical, Dreamers (夢想家), was produced and presented for two nights at cost of more than NT$215 million (US$7.1 million).
Opposition politicians and people in arts circles have said that the budget was exorbitant for a production that ran for just two nights. Big-budget international musicals that often run for 15 to 20 years often cost no more than US$10 million, critics said.
“Sheng’s resignation was merely a damage-control move,” Hung said. “What people in arts circles really care about are the distorted cultural policies, as well as the lack of concrete cultural polices.”
On Thursday, the Cultural Age Foundation Preparation Office launched a signature drive for a campaign titled: “End the Centennial Fireworks and Begin the Cultural Age: The Nine Demands of the Arts and Humanities Sector on Taiwan’s Cultural Policies.”
The signature drive was started by people such as culture critic Chang Tieh-chih (張鐵志), Guling Street Avant-Garde Theatre director Hung Hung and Laiho Culture Foundation chief executive Chou Fu-yi (周馥儀), who plan to use the office to present themselves to the public and satirize the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) use of foundations as seemingly independent groups to present their cultural policies.
The campaign, aside from calling on Sheng to resign, also demanded an apology from President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) for failing to deliver on his 2008 campaign pledge that he would increase the cultural affairs budget from 1.3 percent of the general budget to 4 percent. The campaign also asked the presidential candidates to debate the issue of cultural policies.
The one thing that everyone hates the most is that because of the government’s centennial anniversary arts program, the CCA has gone from being an agency representing high cultural values through its policies to a party-state propaganda service, Hung said.
Translated by Jake Chung, Staff writer
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