The nation has “pampered” the showbiz industry too much, professor emeritus at National Tsing Hua University (NTHU) Lee Chia-tung (李家同) said about a flood of reports on a showbiz personality involved in the controversial visit by civilians to a restricted-access military base housing US-made AH-64E Apache helicopters.
Apache pilot Lieutenant Colonel Lao Nai-cheng (勞乃成) was found to have conducted a tour on March 29 for a group of civilians, including showbiz personality Janet Lee (李蒨蓉), members of her family and friends, of a restricted area at the brigade’s headquarters, where they posed around and inside Apache helicopters.
The incident came to light after Lee posted four photographs of her visit on Facebook.
“Our nation’s students are completely disinterested in news and are instead focusing only on the sports and entertainment news,” Lee said on Saturday in Taipei in a speech at an event hosted by the Taiwan Heritage Foundation. “Our nation has pampered the stars of our entertainment industry to such a degree that they [the showbiz personalities] think they are a ‘privileged class.’”
“To enter a military base and then post the pictures onto Facebook shows that these individuals know nothing beyond their immediate circle, yet it is these kinds of people that our nation’s citizens praise to the skies,” he said.
The education of the nation’s military officers is also not up to par, Lee said.
Lee said that Taiwan spends a lot of money buying weapons from other countries, but has not done enough to encourage private-sector development of new technology.
The government should not be reliant on foreign weaponry and should instead spend the money on encouraging Taiwanese firms to research the technology, he said, adding that such funding, if invested in education, would lay the foundations for technological developments.
The government is exploring every available channel to purchase new fighter jets, ships and helicopters from foreign nations, but it does not attempt to make them itself, Lee said.
If such trends continue it would see the nation following in the footsteps of the Qing Dynasty in its final days, he said, referring to the dynasty which lasted until 1912, which had at various times sought to effect reform due to Western imperialism, but had mostly imported weaponry from abroad and did not implement plans to supply its own needs.
Lee cited the film The Imitation Game as an example, saying that Britain’s success in World War II was not due to its ships and tanks, but rather because its civilians and bright-minded engineers managed to crack the German Enigma code.
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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