New Power Party (NPP) Legislator Hsu Yung-ming (徐永明) yesterday panned the nation’s campus military instructors for wearing badges bearing the symbol of the China Youth Corps (CYC) and the Chinese National Party (KMT).
Soldiers were first installed as military instructors in high schools, colleges and universities for the indoctrination, combat training and policing of the students during the Martial Law era. They are currently tasked with providing security and military training at schools nationwide.
The government-issued badges are overtly partisan and inappropriate to wear on campuses, Hsu said.
Photo: Chen Yu-fu, Taipei Times
“The CYC badge’s device of white sun on blue sky are symbols of the KMT,” the lawmaker said, citing reports on the corps’ founding on Oct. 4, 1952, by Chinese-language newspapers such as the Popular Daily, the National and the Economic Times.
“The KMT’s six-decade struggle for national revolution means that the Republic of China [ROC] cannot exist without the KMT. The China Youth Corps’ emblem places the KMT emblem at its center as a way of educating Chinese youths of the ROC’s origins and learn how to serve the state,” Hsu quoted the corps as saying at the time.
The corps should stop trying to distance itself from the KMT because the evidence of it being an affiliate organization is incontrovertible, he said.
The military instructor badge is the corps’ white sun on blue sky emblem framed by the a Chinese plum blossom, an ear of wheat and a crossed rifle and an ink brush.
“As the use of the KMT’s badge by military instructors show, the specter of the one-party state continues to haunt our schools and it continues to usurp the government’s authority to brainwash our youths,” he said.
The Ministry of Education should ban such inappropriate political badges as the Legislative Yuan’s mandate to abolish military instruction on campuses is to take effect in 2021, Hsu said.
A year after the CYC’s founding, the Executive Yuan promulgated regulations for the implementation of military training in post-secondary education in Taiwan Province, putting the corps in charge of campus military instruction, an Ill-gotten Party Assets Settlement Committee member said.
According to that regulation, schools must provide three hours of military instruction per week to promote identification with the KMT and anti-communism, resulting in military instructors’ adoption of the CYC symbol, the committee member said.
“In those days, there were three flag poles on campuses, with the middle pole flying the national flag, the CYC flag flying to the left and the school flag flying to the right,” the committee member said.
According to the ministry, an estimated 3,500 soldiers serve as military instructors on campuses.
They are required to wear the badge when wearing their Class A dress uniforms on duty.
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