Late architect and academic Han Pao-teh (漢寶德); writer and translator Chi Pang-yuan (齊邦媛); and poet and writer Yu Kwang-chung (余光中) have won the nation’s highest cultural award, the Executive Yuan Culture Award, the Ministry of Culture said on Monday. The award honors their lifetime achievement in their respective disciplines, it added.
Premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) is to present the awards — along with certificates and cash prizes of NT$1 million (US$32,350) — in a ceremony set for Feb. 9 next year.
Describing the trio as being highly regarded in their fields, Minister of Culture Lung Ying-tai (龍應台) said they have made great contributions to national culture.
Their works and influence have reached far and wide, while their discourse and thoughts have encouraged young people to follow in their footsteps, she said.
Lung said that Han, who died on Thursday last week, explored the philosophy of architecture through the perspectives of history, aesthetics and environmental ethics.
He helped found the National Museum of Natural Science in Greater Taichung, Tainan National University of the Arts and the nation’s first museum studies graduate school.
Chi, who has taught in universities, has systematically promoted translating modern Taiwanese literature into English, the minister said.
Her masterpiece, the River of Big Torrents (巨流河), chronicles her family’s experience amid the turbulence of China in the first half of the 20th century and in Taiwan after 1949. The book also examines the plight of women during these transitional periods.
Yu has worked in creative literature for more than half a century and is well-known in the Chinese-language world. The literary world has lauded him for attaining “unrivaled achievements, while writing poems with his right hand and prose with his left hand.”
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods