A Double Ten National Day celebration yesterday organized by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) highlighted the significance and widespread presence of the national flag, and affirmed the existence of the Republic of China (ROC).
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government has been accused by critics of deliberately minimizing imagery associated with China by removing the ROC flag from the invitations for the official Double Ten National Day ceremony and dinner, as well as not mentioning the ROC.
However, Legislative Speaker Su Jia-chyuan (蘇嘉全), whose job includes the role of National Day Celebration Organizing Committee chairman, said the national flag “lives in our hearts,” adding that the flags were displayed at the ceremony and dinner.
Photo: CNA
The invitation to a celebration hosted by the KMT at Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in Taipei featured a national flag on one side and the portraits of Sun Yat-sen (孫中山) and Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) on the other.
The ceremony began with marching bands carrying national flags and portraits of Sun and Chiang, which were followed by a group of veterans bearing a huge national flag.
In his speech to the ceremony, former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) highlighted the differences between it and the national celebrations, saying that the number of national flags he saw in the afternoon far exceeded that of the official ceremony in the morning, which he had also attended.
“This is what a National Day celebration should look like. This flag has borne the ideas, feelings, struggles, humility and dignity of millions of Chinese people over the past 100 years. It has become the symbol recognized, affirmed and supported by 23 million people in Taiwan as well. Surely we should bring our national flags out and raise them high at important occasions like National Day celebrations,” Ma said.
Former KMT chairwoman Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱) said “our love for the national flag and our use of the ROC as the name of the nation should not be hidden inside.”
“To us, addressing our nation as the ROC and respecting our flag is just as natural as facing the sun and walking on the land. We neither have to fabricate nor hide those feelings,” she said.
Former representative to the US Shen Lyu-shun (沈呂巡) said that he was invited to attend the pan-blue event because during his time in Washington the ROC flag was raised at Twin Oaks — the estate owned by the ROC government and used for official receptions —for the first time in 2015, 37 years after the US and Taiwan severed diplomatic ties.
KMT Chairman Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) said that seeing the national flag should strengthen the faith and reignite the hope of party supporters that the KMT would soon rule the nation again.
Wu asked KMT supporters to unite and work together to help it to win next year’s “nine-in-one” elections for special municipality mayors, county commissioners and city and county councils.
“Let our flags fly in more cities and counties than they do now. If we make significant progress next year, it would open up a chance for us return to power,” he said.
Ma said that he was deeply concerned with the direction in which the DPP administration is heading.
The KMT needs to seize any opportunity it can to convince the public that it has the most effective solution to achieve cross-strait peace and prosperity, he 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