The Ministry of Education (MOE) on Friday said that it is not interfering with the press freedom of the Chinese-language Mandarin Daily News, following criticism over its request to the Taipei District Court on Thursday that it dissolve the newspaper’s board of directors.
The ministry asked the court to dissolve the board, because internal disagreements have made its operations difficult, Minister of Education Pan Wen-chung (潘文忠) said during a question-and-answer session at the Legislative Yuan, adding that the request was made based on the government’s involvement in the founding of the children’s newspaper in 1948.
The ministry asked the court to appoint an interim board to enable the publication to resume normal operations, a process that Pan estimated will take three to six months.
Pan said that the ministry will not be involved in the management of the newspaper or infringe upon its freedoms, but made the request for the good of the newspaper’s employees and the public.
Mandarin Daily News chairman Hung Kuo-liang (洪國樑) rejected the government’s involvement, saying that its funding was used up by 1950 and all the original employees have left the company.
The current company is the result of board of directors’ hard work, he said.
The ministry responded in a statement issued on Friday, saying that the government funding, as well as its provision of equipment and other resources, cannot simply be dismissed.
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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