Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Kuan Bi-ling (管碧玲) said yesterday she would propose that the Council for Cultural Affairs (CCA) withdraw the “historic” designation for a number of sites she said were compromised.
Kuan’s remarks came after the Taipei City Government caused controversy last week by repainting the emblem of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) on Taipei’s East Gate during renovations.
Kuan issued a press release saying that the CCA designated the city’s East Gate, South Gate, Little South Gate and North Gate as national historic sites in 1998.
However, Kuan said it was questionable whether the East Gate, South Gate and Little South Gate should be considered historic sites because their original design had been compromised by the KMT after dictator Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) retreated with his forces to Taiwan, she said.
Kuan said the KMT “branded” the three gates around 1965 by painting its party emblem on them, even though the Japanese government had designated them as historic sites in 1900, during the Japanese colonial era.
North Gate was able to escape “branding” because it was located far away from the routes Chiang usually took to get to work, Kuan said.
“When the Cultural Heritage Preservation Act (文化資產保存法) was first enacted in 1983, the first wave of historic site designations began. Only the North Gate was rated as a first-degree historic site because local historians knew that the East Gate, South Gate and Little South Gate had been compromised by political emblems,” she said.
Kuan said she would propose that the CCA cancel the historic site status for the three gates and document “the KMT’s authoritarian mindset and destruction of local culture” in historical papers.
The East Gate became the center of controversy after a story published by the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper) on Saturday last week revealed that Taipei City’s Department of Cultural Affairs had repainted the KMT emblem on the rooftop of the gate.
DPP city councilors accused the city government and President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration of seeking to restore dictatorship and one-party rule.
Three DPP city councilors on Tuesday climbed to the roof of the gate and painted over the emblem, prompting Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) to threaten to “bring them to justice” for damaging a historic monument.
But the city’s Cultural Assets Review Committee members agreed on Wednesday that preserving the emblem on the East Gate was a debatable issue and that modifications were permissible if done legally.
Kuan said yesterday that the East Gate controversy would serve as an opportunity for the public to gain a better understanding of how the KMT turned real historic sites into “fakes” by branding them with the party emblem.
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