The European Association for Chinese Studies (EACS) has vowed to lodge a protest with China over what it said was a case of political interference in academia by a Chinese government-affiliated body against the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, an executive at the foundation said yesterday.
The incident in question took place on Tuesday last week at the opening ceremony of the EACS’ biennial conference at the Universidade do Minho in Braga, Portugal, when a page about the foundation was reportedly torn out of all brochures for the event to appease visiting Chinese officials.
Upon learning of the incident after the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper) broke the news in its Monday edition, the foundation sent a letter to the Paris-based association to demand an explanation.
The executive, who wished to remain anonymous, said the foundation received a reply from EACS president Roger Greatrex later that day, but gave no further details.
The National Central Library, which hosted an exhibition displaying Taiwanese works on Chinese studies on the sidelines of the three-day event, confirmed later on Monday that staff from the Universidade do Minho ripped page 59 from all the brochures after Chinese officials expressed their displeasure at the page.
The staff did not consult with the EACS first, the library said.
Greatrex wrote in the letter that his association had not informed the foundation of the incident earlier because it needed to get the facts straight first, the executive said.
Beijing was represented at the conference by Xu Lin (許琳), director-general of the Hanban, the common name for the Chinese Ministry of Education’s Chinese National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language.
Universidade do Minho is one of several universities in Portugal that host a Confucius Institute in cooperation with the Hanban.
At a recent board meeting, the association made two decisions in response to the incident, she quoted Greatrex’s reply to the foundation as saying.
According the executive, Greatrex wrote in the letter that the association’s board will give the foundation a report on the matter after examining the circumstances surrounding the incident and if it determines that the Universidade do Minho received instructions from Xu to tear out the brochure pages, it will issue a formal letter of protest to Hanban against its political interference in academia.
She said that the foundation was displeased about the incident, but stressed that its complaint was directed at the Hanban, not the EACS.
The foundation has had a very good cooperative relationship with the Parisian association in promoting Chinese studies for more than 20 years, she added.
Established in 1975, the EACS is an international association representing European academics who specialize in Chinese studies. It has more than 700 members.
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