National Chung Hsing University (NCHU) on Jan. 26 completed its replacement of a bust of Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) with one of late school president Tang Hui-sun (湯惠蓀).
The bust was a topic of controversy during last year’s memorial of the 228 Massacre when students defaced it with a message calling Chiang a “devil who committed a massacre.”
The 228 Massacre refers to the crackdown launched by the the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regime against civilian demonstrations following an incident in Taipei on Feb. 27, 1947, in which a female vendor selling cigarettes illegally was hit by a soldier, sparking the outrage of onlookers.
The event also marked the beginning of the White Terror era, which saw thousands of Taiwanese arrested, imprisoned and executed.
In response to the defacement, the school’s news service on March 18 last year conducted a survey among students and staff to gauge support for the bust’s removal.
Those who supported its removal accounted for 49 percent of respondents, while 17 percent wanted it to remain and 34 percent had no position on the issue, survey results showed.
University administrators held a public hearing on April 26 last year to gather more comprehensive feedback, later calling for a second survey to be conducted by the students’ association on May 18.
The results of the second survey were radically different, according to the school, reporting that 60.9 percent of respondents supported keeping the statue, while only 33.6 percent called for its removal and 5.5 percent had no position.
Responding to concerns that only 500 responses had been received and that the survey did not limit the amount of responses an individual could submit, the school called for a third survey.
Conducted from Oct. 24 to Oct. 31 last year, the third survey was supervised by the school’s vice president and conducted jointly by the student affairs office and the school’s administration, the school said, adding that this time 60 percent of the 900 respondents called for the bust’s removal.
At a meeting to discuss the survey’s results, the school resolved to move the Chiang bust to the archives building and put a bust of Tang in its place, which they completed in 10 days, the school 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:
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