Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislators yesterday accused the Ministry of Culture-sponsored Spotlight Taiwan project of “compromising the integrity of Taiwanese culture” after a poster promoting a performance by Taiwanese group A Moving Sound (聲動樂團) in Heidelberg, Germany, listed China’s Confucius Institutes as one of its sponsors.
The Confucius Institutes were established by China to promote Chinese language and culture, support local Chinese teaching abroad and facilitate cultural exchanges.
In a bid to avoid the international community being dominated solely by Chinese culture as propagated by the institutes, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) in 2011 also launched the Taiwan Academies to promote “Zhonghua culture (中華文化) with Taiwanese influences.”
The ministry launched the Spotlight Taiwan project last year in hopes of further promoting recognition of Taiwanese culture to the communities abroad.
The group, A Moving Sound, has been an important performance group for the project and was scheduled to tour Germany, Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Switzerland this month, the ministry said.
A Taiwanese netizen living in Germany and using the pseudonym RoxanneLi said she spotted the Confucius Institute’s name on the band’s poster and asked why, if the band was performing “music around the world from Taiwan” was the Confucius Institute’s name on the poster.
Netizens asked whether the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) could be working together to promote music from Taiwan.
DPP Legislator Ho Hsin-chun (何欣純) called the incident illogical and absurd.
“It is ludicrous that the ministry could now work together with the organization they had opposed and compromise the integrity of Taiwan’s culture,” Ho said.
Ho alleged that the Confucius Institutes promote materials that brainwash anyone who works with them and use their monopoly on Chinese educational resources to limit and interfere with academic freedom and freedom of speech. This led the Canadian Association of University Teachers to call for universities in Canada to sever ties with the institutes last year, he said.
The American Association of University Professors made the same plea with US universities last year, stating in its committee address last month that “Confucius Institutes function as an arm of the Chinese state and are allowed to ignore academic freedom… Most agreements establishing Confucius Institutes feature nondisclosure clauses and unacceptable concessions to the political aims and practices of the government of China … permit[ting] Confucius Institutes to advance a state agenda in the recruitment and control of academic staff, in the choice of curriculum, and in the restriction of debate.”
Ho called on the ministry to launch an investigation into all promotion materials for the Spotlight Taiwan project to see if the band’s performance in Heidelberg was an isolated incident or if all materials have been “infiltrated.”
“We cannot see Taiwan’s hard-earned cultural diplomatic efforts become part of China’s efforts to expand its ‘united front’ (統戰) tactics,” Ho said.
In response, the ministry said the band’s performance in Germany was not part of the ministry’s Spotlight Taiwan project.
Since Heidelberg University hosted the performance and the university has been a participant in the ministry’s Spotlight Taiwan project, it might have automatically included the name “Spotlight Taiwan,” the ministry said.
The university may have included the project in the promotion brochure because the band originated in Taiwan, the ministry said.
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