Minister of Culture Lung Ying-tai (龍應台) yesterday declined to make a public statement on the Tiananmen Square Massacre, saying that to do so would affect negotiations between Taiwan and China on cultural issues.
At the legislature’s Education and Culture Committee session, Lung was asked by several Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers about her views on the bloody crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing on the night of June 4-June 5, 1989.
“My views regarding the June Fourth Incident as a writer have been expressed in my books,” said Lung, a former essayist and cultural critic known for her writings on both Taiwan’s and China’s systems of government.
Photo: CNA
Lung said she “has the task” of negotiating cultural issues with China under the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) that was signed in June 2010.
Lung was responding to a question put to her by DPP Legislator Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) on whether she would attend a concert held in Taipei last night to commemorate the 23rd anniversary of the massacre.
“If I brought my personal views into cross-strait negotiations, I believe Taiwanese would be disappointed,” Lung said.
Lung told the press during a break that she would withhold her views on the incident in the interests of Taiwan’s publishing, film and TV industries.
In response to DPP Legislator Cheng Li-chiun’s (鄭麗君) call for her to express her views on the incident, Lung said a decisionmaker, unlike a writer, needs to show prudence as well as courage.
She said her personal views could be found in an article she wrote on the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Incident, titled “Who is not a Tiananmen mother? Dedicated to Ding Zilin.”
In the article, Lung described the massacre as an “open and festering wound on the body of a giant.”
“Until the wound is healed, the giant’s health will be a sham and the great future it is rushing toward will not be truly great,” she wrote.
She said in the article the massacre represented the “barbaric nature of power, the loss of reason and the fall of humanity.”
“Until the day it is rehabilitated, it will be carved on the forehead of the Beijing government,” she wrote.
The Chinese government put the official number of deaths in the incident at 23.
However, the international media and other sources estimate that between 800 and 3,000 people lost their lives after troops and tanks fired on the hundreds of thousands of protesters in the Chinese capital.
Taiwan has received more than US$70 million in royalties as of the end of last year from developing the F-16V jet as countries worldwide purchase or upgrade to this popular model, government and military officials said on Saturday. Taiwan funded the development of the F-16V jet and ended up the sole investor as other countries withdrew from the program. Now the F-16V is increasingly popular and countries must pay Taiwan a percentage in royalties when they purchase new F-16V aircraft or upgrade older F-16 models. The next five years are expected to be the peak for these royalties, with Taiwan potentially earning
STAY IN YOUR LANE: As the US and Israel attack Iran, the ministry has warned China not to overstep by including Taiwanese citizens in its evacuation orders The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) yesterday rebuked a statement by China’s embassy in Israel that it would evacuate Taiwanese holders of Chinese travel documents from Israel amid the latter’s escalating conflict with Iran. Tensions have risen across the Middle East in the wake of US and Israeli airstrikes on Iran beginning Saturday. China subsequently issued an evacuation notice for its citizens. In a news release, the Chinese embassy in Israel said holders of “Taiwan compatriot permits (台胞證)” issued to Taiwanese nationals by Chinese authorities for travel to China — could register for evacuation to Egypt. In Taipei, the ministry yesterday said Taiwan
Taiwan is awaiting official notification from the US regarding the status of the Agreement on Reciprocal Trade (ART) after the US Supreme Court ruled US President Donald Trump's global tariffs unconstitutional. Speaking to reporters before a legislative hearing today, Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) said that Taiwan's negotiation team remains focused on ensuring that the bilateral trade deal remains intact despite the legal challenge to Trump's tariff policy. "The US has pledged to notify its trade partners once the subsequent administrative and legal processes are finalized, and that certainly includes Taiwan," Cho said when asked about opposition parties’ doubts that the ART was
If China chose to invade Taiwan tomorrow, it would only have to sever three undersea fiber-optic cable clusters to cause a data blackout, Jason Hsu (許毓仁), a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislator, told a US security panel yesterday. In a Taiwan contingency, cable disruption would be one of the earliest preinvasion actions and the signal that escalation had begun, he said, adding that Taiwan’s current cable repair capabilities are insufficient. The US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) yesterday held a hearing on US-China Competition Under the Sea, with Hsu speaking on
RSS