The trend of Taiwanese being “toyed with” and “bullied” into an “obedient people” was reversed by the rout the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) suffered in the November 2014 nine-in-one elections, Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) said.
Ko made the remarks on Sunday during a lecture at the Ketagalan Institute, which was founded by former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) in 2003 to nurture a new generation of politically adept professionals.
“I have performed genetic research, and personality is related to DNA. In animal experiments, when tame dogs are mated with other tame dogs, the resulting offspring were ever tamer,” Ko said.
Photo: Fang Pin-chao, Taipei Times
“From the anti-Dutch rebellion led by Kuo Huai-yi (郭懷一) to rebellions during the Qing Dynasty and the Japanese colonial era, Taiwanese have stubbornly resisted colonial authorities, but in every revolt they were caught and culled, resulting in all the brave being killed, leaving only obedient people,” Ko said. “I am a mutated specimen; at least that is what I say to console myself.”
However, the 2014 elections “changed the story, as the nation began to recover its confidence,” Ko said.
Ko, the former director of National Taiwan University Hospital’s (NTUH) Department of Traumatology, said he left the hospital to run for Taipei mayor in 2014 because he wanted to “call young people into action” and “defeat the party-state system.”
“Taiwan’s confidence as a maritime nation must now be rediscovered,” because 400 years ago Taiwanese were pirates and brave immigrants, which in theory should have “suffused their bloodlines with the entrepreneurial spirit,” Ko said.
Ko said that during the mayoral race, he campaigned on a bicycle, and since taking office in December 2014 he has repeatedly taken on “difficult challenges and dared to do what has never been done in order to bring back confidence at a subconscious level” for Taiwanese.
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,
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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: