Minister of Culture Lung Ying-tai (龍應台) yesterday said she would not comment on China’s reported ban on the work of Taiwanese novelist and film director Giddens Ko (柯景騰) and Chinese American historian Yu Ying-shih (余英時) unless the reports are confirmed.
Chinese Web sites reported on Saturday that several publishers received a notice from the Chinese State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television asking them to remove books by Ko and Yu from sale and not to publish further work by Yu, Hong Kong writer and critic Leung Man-tao (梁文道) and others.
Lung said her understanding is that Beijing has a standard operating procedure it follows on censorship, and she had not seen evidence of that in the past two days.
She said she would make a public comment if the alleged ban is clarified and confirmed.
The writers were allegedly banned because of their support for Hong Kong’s Occupy Central movement, and for being outspoken supporters of democracy and human rights.
Ko, also known as Jiu Ba-dao (九把刀), openly supported the Sunflower movement, which occupied the main chamber of the legislature in March and April to protest the government’s handling of the cross-strait service trade agreement.
Late last month, he posted photos of his shaved head on Facebook, apparently in support of the Occupy Central movement in Hong Kong. Three organizers of the movement and dozens of others shaved their heads earlier in the month to show their determination to fight for free elections of Hong Kong’s chief executive.
Ko on Sunday on Facebook urged fans not to worry about him.
Ko, one of Taiwan’s best-selling authors, said he did not know what was going on and was not interested in responding to rumors on the Internet.
Ko’s manager said she has been unable to verify the reports as they have yet to hear from Modern Press Co, the Chinese publisher of Ko’s books.
Liya Chu (朱如茵), whose parents are New York-based Taiwanese restaurateurs, has been crowned the champion of US television cooking competition MasterChef Junior, after wowing the judges, including celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, with a feast of fusion cuisine. In the finale of the show’s eighth season, broadcast on Thursday, Chu walked away with US$100,000 after serving a spread of spiced duck breast with scallion pancakes and miso eggplant, followed by coconut pandan panna cotta with a passion fruit coulis and sesame tuille. Chu, who was 10 years old at the time of filming three years ago, faced off against then-11-year-old Grayson Price from
A university student has gained the spotlight for an interactive map he designed detailing all of China’s military bases and installations throughout the Indo-Pacific region. Soochow University music student Joseph Wen (溫約瑟), who calls himself an amateur military enthusiast, said he created the map to “help people better understand the cross-strait situation.” Wen originally posted the map online on June 14 last year, but it gained greater attention after he mentioned it during an appearance on a China Television talk show. On the show, Wen said he had gathered information on the locations from publicly available Web sites, as
GLOBAL STRATEGY: Indo-Pacific alliances need reinforcement to prevent Chinese occupation of Taiwan, which would threaten Japan, Hawaii and Australia, Pompeo said The US should officially recognize Taiwan as a free, independent nation and establish official diplomatic ties, former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo told an event at the Hudson Institute in Washington on Friday. Every US president since Harry Truman has considered Taiwan’s existence to be of utmost importance to US national security, Pompeo said. Taiwan is a principal US partner in technology and economic matters, and if China were to capture Taiwan’s semiconductor supply chain, it would severely hamper the US economy, Pompeo said. Should China occupy Taiwan, it would severely weaken US influence in the Indo-Pacific region and its surrounding areas,
Opening-day ticket sales for a horror exhibition at the Tainan Art Museum were suspended twice on Saturday as the show attracted too many visitors. Titled “Ghosts and Hells: The Underworld in Asian art,” the exhibition runs until Oct. 16. It is the local version of a show that debuted at the Musee du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris. It was planned and curated by Julien Rousseau. The Tainan museum said that within an hour of its doors opening, more than 1,000 people had entered the exhibition. By noon, 3,000 physical and virtual tickets had been sold, while the museum had more than 4,000
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