Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱) said yesterday that the Tiananmen Square Massacre, “temporarily obstructed the forward march of [China] mainland,” but that nation then “came back to the path of reform and opening-up after a short while due to the unstoppable trend of modernization for the zhonghua minzu [Chinese nation].”
In a Facebook post concerning the June 4, 1989, massacre, Hung said that every year on the anniversary of the incident she gets a “special feeling.”
“This incident is certainly a mishap and a tragedy. From a long-term historical perspective, 6/4 did temporarily obstruct the mainland’s advance, but since the modernization of the zhonghua minzu is an unstoppable trend, the mainland returned once again to the road of reform and opening up... and has grown rapidly in the past 20 years,” Hung said.
Hung wrote that although she is “not particularly in sync with many of my mainland friends,” her view is that those who participated in the event “contributed greatly to what [China] has achieved with reform and opening up.”
“Regardless of the differences in the views we might have of them, they all reflected a kind of astuteness of the time and a willingness to actively participate in the event. I think it is exactly this willingness that has made Chinese society quickly swing back to the right track of openness,” she wrote.
“Just think about it. Are the calls for democracy and rule of law made by those elites who participated in the June 4 event not exactly what [China] is now heading toward?” she wrote.
Hung also related the KMT to the idea of the Chinese nation.
“Putting aside the clashes in the past [between the Chinese Communist Party and the KMT], is the effort the KMT has made in Taiwan not also aimed at finding a better way to democracy and liberty for the children of zhonghua minzu?”
She called for a life full of “tolerance” and “respect” for all “Chinese children.”
“We have seen that the societies on both sides of the Taiwan Strait are walking toward this ideal. Since [China] has shown — different from before — its ability to be tolerant, could it then consider granting a more tolerant handling of this historical wound?” Hung wrote.
Former KMT spokesperson Yang Wei-chung (楊偉中) said “fury” is the only emotion he felt after reading Hung’s post.
He accused Hung of writing the post “with the tone of a lackey” who “begs for tolerance from the oppressor and the dictator.”
Yang also lambasted Hung for her “distorted understanding” of the historical connection between the crackdown and reform, claiming that hope for real, comprehensive reforms had all but been destroyed by the incident.
“So in Hung’s mind, China is now on the path to democracy and rule of law under communist rule —— so the only problem remaining for Hung is to have the rulers ‘tolerate’ those June 4 elites for them to ‘participate’ and to have the chance to ‘sacrifice’ themselves in order to contribute to the Chinese nation,” Yang said.
“In the end, this is how a belief in historical truth and universal values is being trumped by Hung’s nationalistic longing as one of the ‘Chinese children,’” Yang said.
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
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
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