Sun Yat-sen’s (孫逸仙) designation as the nation’s “founding father” should be dropped, Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Gao Jyh-peng (高志鵬) said yesterday, pledging to push for legislation to remove the legal requirement that Sun’s portrait be displayed in public buildings.
Gao said that Sun’s title as the nation’s “founding father” is a remnant of one-party rule under the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) authoritarian regime and ran against democratic principles.
Legal mentions of the designation are seen only in connection with the national flag, he said, citing the National Emblem and National Flag of the Republic of China Act (中華民國國徽國旗法) and the Oath Act (宣誓條例).
The National Emblem Act states that the national flag should be placed “above the portrait of the father of the nation” in government buildings, while the Oath Act mandates that officials taking the oath of office should face both the national flag and the “portrait of the father of the nation.”
While the flag is a symbol of the nation whose status is mandated in the Constitution, Sun’s status as “founding father” was crafted by Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) as a tool to justify the legitimacy of his regime, Gao said, questioning why leaders should be obligated to bow before something that has no relation to Taiwan’s modern democratic society.
While requirements mandating that portraits of Chiang and his son, former president Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國), be displayed in schools were abolished in 2002, the KMT had previously blocked legislation to drop requirements to display Sun’s portrait, Gao said.
Lee Hsiao-feng (李筱峰), a professor at National Taipei University of Education’s Graduate School of Taiwanese Culture, echoed Gao’s proposal, saying that Sun was only designated as the “founding father” in 1940 as part of an executive order intended to whitewash Chiang Kai-shek’s distortion of history and bolster his claim of being Sun’s successor.
While Sun made an undeniable contribution to the 1911 Xinhai Revolution that overthrew the Qing Dynasty, the revolution’s success also depended on many other people, Lee said, adding that Sun should be removed from the “cult of personality” built around him by Chiang Kai-shek.
Earlier this month, Kaohsiung Municipal Senior High School announced it would no longer make its students bow to portraits of Sun and the national flag in its end-of-semester ceremony.
Bowing three times to the flag and Sun’s portrait during school ceremonies has been a tradition for students in elementary, junior-high and high schools.
The school’s principal said the move was not politically motivated, while a student council called it a step toward depoliticizing the campus and achieving transitional justice.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
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,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods