During the Beijing Winter Olympics, Taiwanese speedskater Huang Yu-ting (黃郁婷) provoked a storm of criticism for what was seen as pro-China behavior.
First, she posted a video of herself wearing a Chinese national team skinsuit before the start of the Games, then she told Chinese media after a race that “it felt like I was competing at home.”
The public slammed the Sports Administration and the Chinese Taipei Olympic Committee (CTOC) for their “weakness” in retaining Huang as the national flagbearer at the opening ceremony.
One media outlet tried to come to their defense, saying that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) was hanging the threat of membership cancelation over Taiwan’s head if Taipei replaced the flagbearer or was absent from the opening ceremony due to COVID-19 disease prevention measures.
Meanwhile, Huang, who has not apologized for her scandalous behavior, did express regret for the video, saying in an exclusive interview that she would not have shared it had she known it would cause such controversy.
Her father, who is also her coach, tried to gain pity for his daughter, saying that she lost her appetite during the Games because of cyberbullying.
However, the media’s ploy to soothe the public’s outrage and pass the buck to the IOC was rebutted by the Sports Administration, which clarified in a news conference that there was no such intimidation.
After Huang had finished competing at the Beijing Winter Olympics, she took to Facebook, saying: “Thanks to everyone who cheered for me, I have finished my second Olympics. The comment section is now open for haters and trolls,” making her so-called “regret” seem all the more disingenuous.
It is hard to believe that the IOC would actually interfere in how countries choose their flagbearers, let alone threaten to hand out penalties for it. The whitewashing by a certain media outlet and Huang’s claimed “ignorance” of the sensitivity of cross-strait politics is hypocrisy at its extreme.
As the government has full control and jurisdiction over the CTOC, it is high time an investigation is conducted into Huang’s misconduct.
[Editor’s note: Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) on Saturday told the Sports Administration and Ministry of Education to investigate Huang’s remarks and actions before and during the Games.]
With a pro-Taiwan stance being the general consensus in the nation, Taiwanese have found it difficult to stomach Huang’s ludicrous behavior of wearing the Chinese team uniform and making pro-China comments.
After seeing her unapologetic and bellicose attitude on the Internet, it would be safe to say that it was Huang who is to blame for offending Taiwanese. Can the CTOC and the media — who were soft-pedaling the incident — really turn a blind eye to such flagrant and shameless behavior?
For the past decade, Huang was honored with Guo Guang Athletic medals and scholarships, receiving at least NT$14.1 million (US$505,666) from the government. If the training funds and subsidies that the Sports Administration gives to outstanding athletes for the Asian Games and the Olympics are included, Huang received more than NT$1 million last year and more than NT$10 million in the past decade.
As a national team athlete who has committed grave misconduct by harming the image and dignity of the nation, the Sports Administration and the administration of President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) made amends by replacing her as the flagbearer before the closing ceremony.
For such an unpatriotic national team athlete to promote China’s unification ideology while leeching on taxpayers’ money is truly a shame for Taiwan. The public will have to wait and see whether the government and the Sports Administration deal out a penalty that the athlete rightfully deserves.
Chin Ching is an educator.
Translated by Rita Wang
Chinese agents often target Taiwanese officials who are motivated by financial gain rather than ideology, while people who are found guilty of spying face lenient punishments in Taiwan, a researcher said on Tuesday. While the law says that foreign agents can be sentenced to death, people who are convicted of spying for Beijing often serve less than nine months in prison because Taiwan does not formally recognize China as a foreign nation, Institute for National Defense and Security Research fellow Su Tzu-yun (蘇紫雲) said. Many officials and military personnel sell information to China believing it to be of little value, unaware that
Before 1945, the most widely spoken language in Taiwan was Tai-gi (also known as Taiwanese, Taiwanese Hokkien or Hoklo). However, due to almost a century of language repression policies, many Taiwanese believe that Tai-gi is at risk of disappearing. To understand this crisis, I interviewed academics and activists about Taiwan’s history of language repression, the major challenges of revitalizing Tai-gi and their policy recommendations. Although Taiwanese were pressured to speak Japanese when Taiwan became a Japanese colony in 1895, most managed to keep their heritage languages alive in their homes. However, starting in 1949, when the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) enacted martial law
“Si ambulat loquitur tetrissitatque sicut anas, anas est” is, in customary international law, the three-part test of anatine ambulation, articulation and tetrissitation. And it is essential to Taiwan’s existence. Apocryphally, it can be traced as far back as Suetonius (蘇埃托尼烏斯) in late first-century Rome. Alas, Suetonius was only talking about ducks (anas). But this self-evident principle was codified as a four-part test at the Montevideo Convention in 1934, to which the United States is a party. Article One: “The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: a) a permanent population; b) a defined territory; c) government;
The central bank and the US Department of the Treasury on Friday issued a joint statement that both sides agreed to avoid currency manipulation and the use of exchange rates to gain a competitive advantage, and would only intervene in foreign-exchange markets to combat excess volatility and disorderly movements. The central bank also agreed to disclose its foreign-exchange intervention amounts quarterly rather than every six months, starting from next month. It emphasized that the joint statement is unrelated to tariff negotiations between Taipei and Washington, and that the US never requested the appreciation of the New Taiwan dollar during the
RSS