There are 500 statues of Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) at Taiwanese public institutions, statistics released by the Transitional Justice Commission showed.
There are also 210 public buildings and spaces — including schools, roads, parks, public squares and cultural centers — across the nation that are named after or dedicated to Chiang or his son Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國), the commission said.
The commission on July 19 requested local governments and central government agencies to inventory the statues of the two Chiangs under their jurisdictions, as well as the public buildings and spaces named after or dedicated to them, and report back within a month.
Photo: Lee Jung-ping, Taipei Times
As of Monday, the commission had received responses from 21 central government agencies and 10 city or county governments.
Of the 500 Chiang Kai-shek statues, 277 are in the Cihu (慈湖) area of Taoyuan’s Dasi District (大溪), the commission said.
There are also 25 posthumous portraits of Chiang Kai-shek, 11 posthumous portraits of Chiang Ching-kuo and 12 statues of Chiang Ching-kuo — two of which are in the Cihu area — it added.
Photo: Tsai Ya-hua, Taipei Times
There is a statue of Chiang Kai-shek at the Jhunan Brewery (竹南啤酒廠), the Chiayi Distillery (嘉義酒廠) and the National Palace Museum (國立故宮博物院), the Ministry of Finance reported, adding that Taoyuan has the most statues of Chiang Kai-shek, while Penghu County has seven.
The Ministry of Education reportedly did not respond by Monday’s deadline.
The commission had omitted several government agencies — the Presidential Office, Judicial Yuan, Examination Yuan and Control Yuan — from its original request, so it has requested that these agencies respond by tomorrow.
Consequently, the tally of authoritarian symbols across the nation is likely to rise above the number provided by the commission.
According to an unnamed source, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government, during the Martial Law era, ordered that statues of Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang Ching-kuo be erected.
However, the commission has said that, in accordance with Article 5 of the Act on Promoting Transitional Justice (促進轉型正義條例), symbols that honor or remember authoritarian rulers in public buildings or spaces should be removed, renamed or otherwise handled to establish the constitutional structure of a free democracy, deny the legitimacy of authoritarian rule and learn from the lessons of human rights violations in history.
A commission member who declined to be named said that the inventory’s purpose is threefold: to pinpoint where authoritarian symbols are located; to highlight how images that glorify Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang Ching-kuo, who directed the White Terror era, have hindered free and democratic thought; and to explore how the ideology inspired by the symbols has seeped into Taiwanese homes and everyday life.
Apart from requesting deadline extensions, some agencies have called to ask whether the inventory should include public markets and parking lots named after Chiang Kai-shek, the commission member added.
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