US-born professional basketball player Quincy Davis (戴維斯) is to lead a group of other naturalized Taiwanese in singing the national anthem at the New Year’s Day flag-raising ceremony in front of the Presidential Office Building.
People who were naturalized last year as citizens of the Republic of China were invited to sing the anthem at the ceremony on Jan 1, the office announced yesterday.
Others invited include Turkish comedian and TV host Ugur Rifat Karlova (吳鳳), Burmese Yang Wan-li (楊萬莉), Vietnamese Chen Yu-shui (陳玉水) and Australian physician Peter Kenrick (柯彼得), the office said.
The office also invited groups of young performers who have done well at international events this year, it said.
These groups include the Taipei Municipal Jianguo High School marching band, which represented Taiwan at the World Cheerleading Competition, and the Feather Art of Drum and Dance troupe, it said.
The marching band won gold at the World Association of Marching Show Bands in Taipei in August, having been in the top three for the three previous years, while the troupe won gold at the Asian Percussion Festival in Tokyo in July.
The Taipei Municipal First Girls’ Senior High School marching band and an honor guard from the military are also to attend the ceremony, the office said.
The Manufacturers’ United General Association of Industrial Parks, which is helping to organize the ceremony, said that preparations were going well.
The association was confident in its preparations due to its experience with the event last year, association chairman Chin Chia-hung (秦嘉鴻) said.
The theme this year is “To go forward in the world with bravery and confidence,” which expresses the nation’s unity and willingness to interact with the world, “demonstrating not only our capabilities, but also our belief in democratic values,” Chin 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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