Democracy should not be used against democracy, President William Lai (賴清德) said during a visit to the national archives on Commemoration Day of the Lifting of Martial Law yesterday.
Lai and Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) visited the National Archives Administration and its reading center to review declassified records from the 228 Incident and the Martial Law era, including documents promulgated by the then-government under the National Security Act During the Period of National Mobilization for Suppression of the Communist Rebellion.
Lai said that as Tainan mayor in 2014, he observed the anniversary of the death of Tang Te-chang (湯德章), a martyr of democracy in the 228 Incident, on Tainan’s Justice and Courage Memorial Day.
Photo: CNA
The archives are a record of the authoritarian government persecuting Taiwanese and also the legacies of those affected during the struggle for democracy, he said.
The archives should appeal to the public to visit, so they could understand that the nation’s democracy would not have existed without the sacrifices made by tens of thousands of their predecessors, he added.
Lai said the martial arts novel The Legend of the Condor Heroes (射鵰英雄傳) written by late novelist Jin Yong (金庸) is one of his favorite books and it was banned during the Martial Law era.
The novel was prohibited as the government did not want Taiwanese reading stories about gallant people rising up against corruption, agency research fellow Hsu Feng-yuan (許峰源) said, adding that censorship adversely affected people’s lives.
The declassification rate of the archives has reached 99.96 percent with only 26 documents still classified, while information originally approved for permanent classification that has yet to be transferred amounts to 4,556 documents from eight cases, National Archives Administration Director-General Lin Chiu-yen (林秋燕) said in her briefing.
The agency has requested a review of the declassification and downgrading of classified records by Aug. 27, she added.
Records deemed to contain national security information should be declassified after a maximum of 40 years, with only three exceptions — if declassification could imperil intelligence agents who have collected information against China, could seriously impact national security or external relations, or could jeopardize intelligence collection against China, Lin said.
Extension to the classification period of these exceptions must be submitted to a national security meeting for approval with a maximum of three years for each extension, she said.
Cho in his speech said that Taiwan has built a democratic system after the world’s second-longest martial law of the modern era.
Declassification of the records is so the nation can be honest with historical facts and be accountable to those affected and their families, he said.
To remember history is not to remember hatred, but to prevent history from repeating itself, Cho said, citing prestigious Czech novelist Milan Kundera: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
Separately, the military honor guards performed their first guard mounting at Democracy Boulevard in Taipei yesterday, after ceasing their 44-year sentry duty at the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall at 5pm on Sunday.
The Ministry of Culture said the sentries were removed to fulfill transitional justice.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest foundry service provider, yesterday said that global semiconductor revenue is projected to hit US$1.5 trillion in 2030, after the figure exceeds US$1 trillion this year, as artificial intelligence (AI) demand boosts consumption of token and compute power. “We are still at the beginning of the AI revolution, but we already see a significant impact across the whole semiconductor ecosystem,” TSMC deputy cochief operating officer Kevin Zhang (張曉強) said at the company’s annual technology symposium in Hsinchu City. “It is fair to say that in the past decade, smartphones and other mobile devices were
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS