The National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) earlier this week voted to remove a bronze statue of Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) from its campus and to relocate the structure to an indoor location.
The move came after protests led by students earlier this year.
At a school affairs meeting on Wednesday, more than half of those present voted to relocate the statue — currently located nearby Cheng Kung Lake (成功湖) on the campus — to the university’s archive. The relocation is slated to take place early next year.
Photo: Meng Ching-tzu, Taipei Times
An official from the university was quoted as saying that “the statue is part of history. There is no need to destroy it, otherwise these pieces of history won’t be found in the future.”
On Feb. 28 this year, a group of NCKU students marked the 65th anniversary of the 228 Incident by staging an art installation on campus to symbolize the horrific and brutal moment in Taiwanese history in the hope of raising public awareness about the nation’s past mistakes.
Members of the student organization 02 Group (零貳社) — whose name is a phonetic translation of “protest” in Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) — hung a placard reading “1947-2012” on the statue and placed the names of victims of the 228 Massacre around the statue.
The 228 Incident refers to a massacre that sparked a massive 1947 nationwide uprising against the then-Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regime. The uprising was brutally crushed in a violent crackdown spearheaded by the state. That tragic event also marked the beginning of the White Terror era that saw thousands of people arrested, imprisoned and executed.
The students’ art installation this February stirred heated debate at the university about whether the statue should be removed.
Chen Yi-chen (陳以箴), head of the 02 Group, said the school’s decision to move the statue is a major breakthrough.
“This is just the beginning. We should dismantle all the symbols of authoritarian rule which still exist on campus,” she said.
She added that the university is treating the decision as a simple act of relocating a statue and is unwilling to consider the wider issues of authoritarianism on campus.
“Our university is quite conservative. In classrooms, administration facilities, in the interactions between faculty and students there are still leftovers of a past authoritarian mentality. Such a mentality needs be removed,” 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:
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
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
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