The nation’s large number of unmarried men and women is a national security crisis, Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) said yesterday, clarifying previous comments which appeared to assert that only unmarried women were a problem.
“Marriage generally occurs very late,” Ko said, citing statistics from the Taipei City Government’s Department of Civil Affairs that show 59 percent of men and 50 percent of woman between 30 and 34 years of age have never been married.
“Marriage has already become a national problem because if these people remain unmarried, when they grow older they will become a major burden on social services,” he said.
Photo: Chang Chia-ming, Taipei Times
Ko said his awareness of the problem arose during his tenure at National Taiwan University hospital when he discovered that many elderly people did not have a relative who could sign a letter of consent for medical procedures.
“The family is the most basic unit of social welfare,” Ko said. “If there are too many people in a society who do not marry, their social welfare ends up becoming the responsibility of the government.”
Ko added that it was important for the government to begin preparing to shoulder the burden because the present social welfare system is ill-prepared to handle the challenge.
Ko made his remarks at a news conference held to clarify comments he made earlier yesterday which appeared to call unmarried women a “national security problem.”
“Men and women both have a problem when it comes to marriage,” he said.
His earlier comments on the “national security problem” of low marriage rates only mentioned unmarried women. In response to media inquiries, he said that the number of unmarried women was far higher than the number of unmarried men, appearing to refer to the large number of Taiwanese men who marry women from overseas.
Ko said raising marriage and birth rates would require providing young people with conditions in which they felt comfortable marrying and having children.
When asked how he viewed the Taipei City Government’s policy of providing subsidies to parents of newborn infants, he said that relieving the high cost of education and childcare was more important than cash payments for giving birth, adding that the the city government would take the costs into consideration as it drafts the “2050 Taipei” plan for city development.
Meanwhile, the Awakening Foundation yesterday released a statement protesting Ko’s comments, calling them the latest in a series of bigoted statements about women on his part.
While Ko devalued women by claiming that unmarried woman were a “national security crisis,” the real national security crisis was the lack of gender awareness by politicians like Ko, the foundation said.
Additional reporting by Chen Ping-hung
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
RISK FACTORS: ‘We hope people can cooperate and endure it ... it is possibly the very important last mile,’ Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung said Taiwan’s COVID-19 restrictions and mask regulations are to remain the same next month, the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) said yesterday. The center reported 42,112 new local COVID-19 cases and 85 deaths, saying that the number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients has dropped to a new low this month. Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), who heads the CECC, said that the center is keeping COVID-19 restrictions and mask regulations the same due to the local virus situation, and an increase in the number of imported cases of the new Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 of SARS-CoV-2, among other risk factors. Easing
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