A small group of Tibetan independence advocates rallied outside the Legislative Yuan in Taipei yesterday amid preparations for the annual Tibetan Uprising Day march on Sunday.
About 20 people shouted “Free Tibet” as they arrived on bicycles streaming Tibetan flags as part of a weekly cycling trip around downtown Taipei to promote the march.
“We in Taiwan should not do nothing in the face of the continuous stream of protests we see coming out of Tibet,” said Lee Peng-hsuan (李芃萱), a specialist in the East Asian branch of the International Tibet Network.
Photo: Lu Yi-hsuan, Taipei Times
She compared the abortive March 10, 1959, uprising by Tibetans against Beijing’s rule to the 228 Incident in 1947 against the then-Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) administration.
The Dalai Lama fled to India following the 1959 rebellion’s suppression, establishing a Tibetan government-in-exile.
“Putting on events around the world to commemorate the Tibetan Uprising is important because the 6 million Tibetans who continue to reside in Tibet have no way to publicize their plight,” Taiwanese Tibetan Welfare Association head Tashi Tsering said.
New Power Party (NPP) Legislator Kawlo Iyun Pacidal, who is an Amis and former Hualien County Council member, compared the cultural, political and environmental damage suffered by Tibetans to the experience of Taiwan’s Aborigines.
“The fact that we are no longer able to protect our rights in this land makes it all the more imperative that we support Tibetans’ freedom and independence,” she said.
NPP Legislator Freddy Lim (林昶佐) called for opening up opportunities for Tibetans to come to Taiwan for work and study, adding that the Tibet Uprising Day march would serve as an opportunity to promote an effort to have the Dalai Lama visit Taiwan again.
“The timing for a Dalai Lama’s visit should be determined by Taiwanese, not China,” he said.
The Dalai Lama has visited several times in the past and Lim invited him to come again when the lawmaker met the Buddhist leader during a trip to India in September last year.
Taiwan Association for Human Rights secretary-general Chiu E-ling (邱伊翎) reiterated calls for the passage of refugee legislation to provide a formal mechanism for the admittance of Tibetan refugees, stating that there are still at least 18 undocumented Tibetan refugees in the nation, even after the passage of special legislation granting residency rights to those who entered the country prior to June last year.
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