The government has been asked to help ethnic Chinese revive Mandarin and Chinese cultural education in Kolkata, India.
“I have received pleas for help from the leaders of ethnic Chinese groups during my visits to the groups in Kolkata this year,” said Chen Ho-hsien (陳和賢), the head of the technology division of Taiwan’s representative office in India.
They asked for assistance in addressing the lack of qualified Mandarin teachers and textbooks in the capital of West Bengal state, Chen said.
The diplomat said that he immediately relayed the request to the government, adding that the Ministry of Education has commissioned National Tsing Hua University to establish an education center in Kolkata to promote Mandarin-language education.
The planned facility could help attract qualified Mandarin teachers to Kolkata, home to about 4,000 ethnic Chinese, Chen said.
As for the need for Chinese language and culture textbooks, the Overseas Community Affairs Council can help meet the request, he said.
In the past few years, demand for Mandarin-speaking interpreters has surged in India, particularly in Kolkata — home to one of the largest ethnic Chinese groups in South Asia — amid India’s growing economic and trade ties with Taiwan and China, Chen said.
The demand has triggered an interest among people there to learn Mandarin, but it is difficult to find qualified teachers and textbooks in the city after the only remaining Chinese school there closed several years ago, he added.
Liu Pei-chu (劉斐珠) and Abhrajit Choudhury, who teach Mandarin at schools in Kolkata, said some Indonesian businesspeople have opened Mandarin language schools even though they do not have qualified teachers.
They said that students cannot learn to speak the language properly under such circumstances, and urged Taiwan to help with the lack of teachers.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching