Once a major production location for the original Barbie doll, a northern township is showcasing celebrity dolls to highlight the contribution women have made to Taiwan’s history.
More than 20 dolls, modeled on important Taiwanese female figures in the past century, such as revolutionary Dharma Master Cheng Yen (證嚴法師), golf player Yani Tseng (曾雅妮) and the late pop diva Fong Fei-fei (鳳飛飛), are on display in New Taipei City’s (新北市) Taishan District (泰山) from Thursday until the end of this year.
The exhibition has three main aims — recognizing the role of women in history, raising cultural awareness and creating job opportunities, said Ku Tsuei-eh (古翠娥), manager of the New Taipei Doll’s Community Cooperative Association.
Photo: CNA
“Why do women need to depend on men anyway? We have so many outstanding female role models in our history,” she said.
The dolls were all designed by women and handmade by wives who wished to return to the labor force, Ku said.
The Barbie doll display is part of a broader community project called “Mattel girls,” after the toy manufacturing company Mattel Ltd that began manufacturing the famous doll in the town in the late 1960s.
Launched in 2007 by then-Taishan township chief Lee Kuo-shu (李國書), the project is expected to bring about a cultural revival through original “Taiwan-branded dolls.”
“More than half of Taishan’s population used to depend on the production of Barbie dolls under the town’s original manufacturing equipment contracts for Western countries, but now it’s time for us to make our own dolls and to tell our own stories,” Lee said.
Chou Ching-fan, a 58-year-old Taishan resident who has been part of in the “Mattel girls” program for the past five years, said doll making is a fulfillment of her childhood dreams.
“I remember looking desperately at other girls holding dolls with adjustable arms and legs, while mine were rigid and silly,” she said, as she carefully threaded black hair onto a doll.
Chou said she took great pleasure in making a doll of Fong, a woman she hailed as achieving so much in her life.
Fong, who died in January this year of lung cancer, was one of the nation’s most popular pop divas in the 1970s and 1980s.
“Fong was extraordinary,” Chou said. “I sing her songs all the time as I spend weeks trying to interpret her life through my work.”
“When I look at a doll I made of her, I realize that no one makes them better,” she said. “That sense of achievement makes me so very happy.”
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods