Taiwan expressed its sadness yesterday over the death of Chinese democracy activist Fang Lizhi (方勵之), who died on Friday last week in Tucson, Arizona, at the age of 76 after years of exile in the US.
“Every member of the Taiwanese public shares the same feeling of sorrow about his passing,” Mainland Affairs Council Deputy Minister Liu Te-shun (劉德勳) said in response to questions at a regular news briefing.
Liu said the death of Fang, a liberal academic who was an inspiration for the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protesters, was a loss for the development of China’s human rights and civil rights.
The Taiwanese government has long made clear its stance on the development of democracy in China and that democracy is a universal value, Liu said.
“Any responsible government must face its people with this [democratic] way of thinking,” he added.
Fang, an astrophysicist and former University of Science and Technology of China vice president, was expelled from the Chinese Communist Party and removed from his post at the university in 1987 because of a statement advocating democracy.
During the 1989 protests in Beijing, Fang and his wife were granted asylum at the US embassy, where they stayed for a year before being flown to Britain on a US aircraft. Six months later, they moved to the US, where Fang was later employed as a physics professor at the University of Arizona.
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