While drumming up support for the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) candidates in southern Taiwan for the November local government elections, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) gave a personal analysis of history and economics by bringing up the Dutch colonial rule era and comparing Greater Tainan with New York City.
Ma’s comments astounded many members of the public and was scorned online as an incongruous and ridiculous comparison, while many Tainan residents said they felt insulted.
Ma pointed to the “relative backwardness and lack of development” in Tainan, Taiwan’s fourth-largest city, in contrast with the advanced urban metropolis of New York, when he addressed a KMT central standing committee meeting on Wednesday.
“In the year 1624, the Dutch, who are a great seafaring people, took two separate ways on their sailing ships. One group went to the present-day New York City. Another group arrived at Anping Port (安平港) of Tainan,” Ma told the KMT functionaries and senior party members.
“We see what New York City is like today, and what Anping Port is like today,” he added. “After 390 years, [we see] large differences between these two places.”
Many Tainan residents said Ma’s comparison was an insult to them, because their city had experienced slow growth under six decades of KMT rule, as most of the nation’s resources and government-subsidized development were diverted to the capital, Taipei.
“If Ma feels Taiwan is not so good, he can go back to live in the US. His comment is so out of line it is a disgrace to himself and to Taiwan,” Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Tuan Yi-kang (段宜康) said.
An online commenter called David wrote: “Compared with New York City, even Taipei would seem like a backwater.”
One netizen called Peng wrote: “Ma’s view of history is laughable. So many conditions are different between the two cities. It is a ridiculous comparison, with no logical reasoning. I cannot see how this man graduated from Harvard.”
Another commenter named Jigang wrote: “Even Taipei may not win in comparison to Fukuoka, or other major cities in Japan. But Ma dares to take NYC for comparison with Tainan?”
Other netizens said Ma’s comments reflect his mindset of preferring to live among Americans in the US, and the superior attitude of Chinese mainlanders and KMT core supporters in Taipei looking down on “backward” people in southern Taiwan.
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:
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