Cabinet members’ Facebook pages came under fire on Monday from Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Kuan Bi-ling (管碧玲), who likened them to “mummies,” because they were either auto-generated or have not been updated in a long time.
The “Internet development classes” that Premier Mao Chi-kuo (毛治國) urged the ministers to take have resulted in nothing, Kuan said.
The classes were aimed at improving government officials’ skills and understanding of the Internet to help them better communicate with the younger generation online, which Mao has been pushing since he took over as premier following the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) rout in last year’s nine-in-one elections.
Kuan said that while the DPP has promoted “iDrafting” — a call to netizens to present proposals that the party can discuss at its Central Standing Committee meetings — and Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) has instituted “i-Voting” — a process by which netizens can vote for certain Taipei City officials — the Cabinet has yet to catch up with the Internet trend.
“DPP Chairperson [Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文)] has said that the Internet can be an ‘anti-aging’ tool for the party. The government, political parties and politicians have to enter this field, or risk aging and being deactivated in the market of public opinion,” Kuan said.
She said that Cabinet ministers have not only aged, but have become “mummified.”
“[Vice Premier] Simon Chang (張善政) and [National Development Council Minister] Woody Duh (杜紫軍) are still ministers without portfolios [on Facebook]; [Minister of Education] Wu Se-hwa (吳思華) and [Minister of Health and Welfare] Chiang Been-huang (蔣丙煌) are still university president and professor; Mao and [Minister of Economic Affairs] John Deng (鄧振中) have auto-generated pages; [Minister of the Interior] Chen Wei-zen (陳威仁) and [Minister of Transportation and Communications] Chen Chien-yu (陳建宇) do not even have auto-generated accounts,” Kuan said.
“Our Cabinet could be said to be ‘i-Dying,’” she said.
Chang’s position on his page was corrected to “vice premier” yesterday after Kuan’s criticism.
His office said that the vice premier had updated his information in person and would continue doing so in the future.
Executive Yuan officials yesterday said that the premier, the vice premier and other ministers were simply too busy to run their own pages.
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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