There are many different ways for college graduates to celebrate their graduation day, but there is probably no better way to celebrate the occasion by expressing the patriotism of the young mind.
Hundreds of graduates of I-Shou University in Kaohsiung carried, wore, bore and held up the national flag in various sizes or put flag stickers on their foreheads at their graduation ceremony on Saturday. The move came after students learned that the school authorities allegedly removed the flags installed at the auditorium in a bid to avoid embarrassing presidents of the university’s sister schools in China, who were in Taiwan to participate in a forum scheduled on the eve of the ceremony.
Some students slammed the school over the “ridiculousness” of “not being able to show our national flag in our own nation,” while others said they felt “deeply insulted” by the removal of the flags.
I-Shou University president Fu Shen-li (傅勝利) said the flags had been removed because the auditorium was redesigned when the school hosted the 53rd Asia Pacific Film Festival in December last year. However, this did not explain why the school never reinstalled the flags after the festival and what the rationale was behind the new design without the flags.
The fact that the incident took place in the university that has the most Chinese exchange students among universities in Taiwan is significant.
While the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government is preoccupied with attempts to push through amendments to the Act Governing Relations Between the Peoples of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (台灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the University Act (大學法) and the Vocational School Act (專科學校法) to allow Chinese students to enroll in Taiwanese schools and to give recognition to Chinese diplomas, I-Shou’s students are showing the school and the administration how disturbing the proposed policy is and how dissatisfied they are at the school’s and the government’s China-leaning policy.
Their voices were loud and clear, but did the government hear it?
Ho Cho-fei (何卓飛), the director of the Ministry of Education’s Department of Higher Education, told the I-Shou forum on Friday that the bills are expected to clear the legislative floor in an extra session to be held sometime between early next month and early August.
The ministry and the KMT may have to think twice now before taking advantage of the party’s legislative majority to force through the bills during the extra session.
Legislators have other bills that should be given higher priority if they were to hold an extra session, including a geology bill that would restrict development in sensitive areas or areas vulnerable to disasters, an amendment to the Disaster Prevention and Protection Act (災害防救法) and bills related to land preservation and disaster relief — bills that could help save lives in the next typhoon season and many years to come.
Lawmakers passed significantly fewer proposals — a total of 76 — in the spring session compared with the number of proposals that cleared the floor in the previous four sessions of the current legislature. Their best record was 134 proposals in the spring session last year.
It is time for our lawmakers to wake up and get down to real business.
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Acting Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) has formally announced his intention to stand for permanent party chairman. He has decided that he is the right person to steer the fledgling third force in Taiwan’s politics through the challenges it would certainly face in the post-Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) era, rather than serve in a caretaker role while the party finds a more suitable candidate. Huang is sure to secure the position. He is almost certainly not the right man for the job. Ko not only founded the party, he forged it into a one-man political force, with himself
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