Three days of activities to commemorate late democracy advocate Deng Nan-jung (鄭南榕) are set to begin on Sunday next week in Kaohsiung, with the city designating April 7 as Freedom of Expression Day in honor of Deng.
Aged 43, Deng killed himself by self-immolation on April 7, 1989, in defense of “100 percent freedom of expression.”
At a press conference yesterday in which Deng’s widow, Yeh Chu-lan (葉菊蘭), was present, Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu (陳菊) delivered an emotional speech, saying she had tried to stop Deng from committing suicide just prior to his death.
The freedom of speech that Taiwanese enjoy is the legacy of pioneering democracy fighters, Chen said.
The Kaohsiung Incident — an anti-government demonstration organized by Formosa Magazine on Dec. 10, 1979, that resulted in the mass arrest and imprisonment of opposition leaders by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) — was a milestone of Taiwanese democracy, according to Chen, who was herself imprisoned for six-and-a-half years for her involvement in the incident.
Deng, the founder and then editor-in-chief of Freedom Era Weekly (自由時代週刊), publicly argued for Taiwanese independence on numerous occasions during the 1980s — a time when vocal supporters of independence were often charged with sedition.
His death sent shock waves through the nation and gave rise to a democratic awakening, Chen said.
Freedom of speech is the foundation of democracy and a universal human right, Chen added.
“From the Wild Lily student movement in 1990 to the Wild Strawberries movement in 2008 and the Sunflower movement last year, the nation has seen different generations of activists striving for democracy and freedom, which has prompted the Taiwanese to value the importance of the freedom of speech,” Chen said.
This year’s activities are set to be themed on the Sunflower movement and Hong Kong’s Umbrella movement, the Kaohsiung City Government said, adding that leaders of the Hong Kong protests, including activist Yvonne Leung (梁麗幗), director Chan Tze-woon (陳梓桓) and Nate Chan (陳芊憓), would attend and share their views on various social issues.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS