Premier Yu Shyi-kun yesterday agreed to grant Taichung City NT$3.2 billion toward its planned establishment of a NT$6.4 billion branch of the Guggenheim Museum and will decide within three weeks whether to grant the city NT$2 billion more.
"We don't have any problem with funding the city half of the construction cost since it's a pledge made by President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁)," Cabinet Secretary-General Liu Shih-fang (劉世芳) quoted Yu as saying.
PHOTO: CNA
"But we have to make sure that we can afford the additional request of NT$2 billion and that the additional funding won't create any backlash from neighboring counties and cities," Liu quoted Yu as saying.
Yu made the remarks yesterday morning while receiving Taichung Mayor Jason Hu (
Hu's visit comes one week after his meeting with Chen, who pledged that the central government would shoulder half of the museum's construction expenses.
Painting Yu's decision as "acceptable," Hu took the opportunity yesterday to shrug off media speculation that his visit was politically motivated.
He stressed that his visit was aimed at boosting the interest of his city and that of central Taiwan.
"I feel like the most expensive gigolo in town with a NT$5 billion price tag placed on my forehead, as many have interpreted my visit today as a political gambit for my personal gain," Hu said.
As a KMT member, Hu said there is no doubt that he has his own political agenda but it is inappropriate for the media to mix it up with his capacity as Taichung mayor.
"As mayor, my job is to do my best to fight for the best interests of my city and this shouldn't be mistaken for the interests of my party," he said.
The recent friendly interactions between the DPP administration and local KMT chiefs have caught media attention. Hu is part of what the media calls "Ma-Li-Chiang" (high horsepower, 馬立強) to describe the three popular KMT government chiefs deemed to have promising political careers.
The three characters are taken from the names of Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (
To fund the additional NT$2 billion, Liu said the Cabinet may include the project in its three-year, NT$300 billion public-construction project or the five-year, NT$500 billion public-construction project -- if the city gets the museum.
"The bottom line is, however, that the additional funds don't overlap with other cultural re-sources or result in disparity of cultural resources allocated in northern, central and southern Taiwan," Liu said.
The Solomon Guggenheim Foundation is studying the feasibility of the planned museum. If it agrees, Taichung will become the first city in the Asia-Pacific region to have a Guggenheim subsidiary.
The Guggenheim has branches in Venice, Berlin, Bilbao, Las Vegas and New York.
Like the Bilbao facility, the Guggenheim Taichung would exhibit a significant amount of contemporary Asian art, including that of Taiwan.
A strong continental cold air mass and abundant moisture bringing snow to mountains 3,000m and higher over the past few days are a reminder that more than 60 years ago Taiwan had an outdoor ski resort that gradually disappeared in part due to climate change. On Oct. 24, 2021, the National Development Council posted a series of photographs on Facebook recounting the days when Taiwan had a ski resort on Hehuanshan (合歡山) in Nantou County. More than 60 years ago, when developing a branch of the Central Cross-Island Highway, the government discovered that Hehuanshan, with an elevation of more than 3,100m,
Taiwan’s population last year shrank further and births continued to decline to a yearly low, the Ministry of the Interior announced today. The ministry published the 2024 population demographics statistics, highlighting record lows in births and bringing attention to Taiwan’s aging population. The nation’s population last year stood at 23,400,220, a decrease of 20,222 individuals compared to 2023. Last year, there were 134,856 births, representing a crude birth rate of 5.76 per 1,000 people, a slight decline from 2023’s 135,571 births and 5.81 crude birth rate. This decrease of 715 births resulted in a new record low per the ministry’s data. Since 2016, which saw
SECURITY: To protect the nation’s Internet cables, the navy should use buoys marking waters within 50m of them as a restricted zone, a former navy squadron commander said A Chinese cargo ship repeatedly intruded into Taiwan’s contiguous and sovereign waters for three months before allegedly damaging an undersea Internet cable off Kaohsiung, a Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) investigation revealed. Using publicly available information, the Liberty Times was able to reconstruct the Shunxing-39’s movements near Taiwan since Double Ten National Day last year. Taiwanese officials did not respond to the freighter’s intrusions until Friday last week, when the ship, registered in Cameroon and Tanzania, turned off its automatic identification system shortly before damage was inflicted to a key cable linking Taiwan to the rest of
China’s newest Type-076 amphibious assault ship has two strengths and weaknesses, wrote a Taiwanese defense expert, adding that further observations of its capabilities are warranted. Jiang Hsin-biao (江炘杓), an assistant researcher at the National Defense and Security Research, made the comments in a report recently published by the institute about the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) military and political development. China christened its new assault ship Sichuan in a ceremony on Dec. 27 last year at Shanghai’s Hudong Shipyard, China’s Xinhua news agency reported. “The vessel, described as the world’s largest amphibious assault ship by the [US think tank] Center for Strategic and International
RSS