Exiled Chinese dissident Wang Dan (王丹) plans to found a think tank in Washington that would serve as an opposing voice to the Chinese government and would create a series of platforms over the next 10 years, he said.
Wang last year moved back to the US after living in Taiwan for eight years.
“This is the second major battle of my life,” he said in Maryland.
The first one was the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest in Beijing, he said.
Wang is to be the chief executive and he has recommended Chinese dissident Hu Ping (胡平) as head of the academic committee, Su Xiaokang (蘇曉康), maker of the documentary River Elegy (河殤), as adviser and Chinese democracy campaigner Wang Juntao (王軍濤) as board chairman.
The final decisions are to be made by vote, he said.
Wang, who has taught at National Tsing Hua University, said that while in Taiwan he was already interested in think tanks and learned much from participating in events by the Youth Synergy Taiwan Foundation.
Chinese dissidents outside of China have campaigns and movements, but no think tanks, he said, adding that people need to do more than criticize the government.
The focus of the think tank is to be on China’s future, specifically its policies, he said.
A small think tank needs about US$500,000 each year, he said, adding that it would be financially difficult to open by June.
Most of the funds have come from friends in Taiwan who share similar political beliefs, he said.
However, many Taiwan independence advocates are not interested in China’s democratization, even though it is closely related to Taiwan’s interests, he said.
Meanwhile, Chinese who have immigrated to the US still fear the Chinese Communist Party, while Hong Kongers have more pressing issues to worry about, he said.
Liya Chu (朱如茵), whose parents are New York-based Taiwanese restaurateurs, has been crowned the champion of US television cooking competition MasterChef Junior, after wowing the judges, including celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, with a feast of fusion cuisine. In the finale of the show’s eighth season, broadcast on Thursday, Chu walked away with US$100,000 after serving a spread of spiced duck breast with scallion pancakes and miso eggplant, followed by coconut pandan panna cotta with a passion fruit coulis and sesame tuille. Chu, who was 10 years old at the time of filming three years ago, faced off against then-11-year-old Grayson Price from
A university student has gained the spotlight for an interactive map he designed detailing all of China’s military bases and installations throughout the Indo-Pacific region. Soochow University music student Joseph Wen (溫約瑟), who calls himself an amateur military enthusiast, said he created the map to “help people better understand the cross-strait situation.” Wen originally posted the map online on June 14 last year, but it gained greater attention after he mentioned it during an appearance on a China Television talk show. On the show, Wen said he had gathered information on the locations from publicly available Web sites, as
GLOBAL STRATEGY: Indo-Pacific alliances need reinforcement to prevent Chinese occupation of Taiwan, which would threaten Japan, Hawaii and Australia, Pompeo said The US should officially recognize Taiwan as a free, independent nation and establish official diplomatic ties, former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo told an event at the Hudson Institute in Washington on Friday. Every US president since Harry Truman has considered Taiwan’s existence to be of utmost importance to US national security, Pompeo said. Taiwan is a principal US partner in technology and economic matters, and if China were to capture Taiwan’s semiconductor supply chain, it would severely hamper the US economy, Pompeo said. Should China occupy Taiwan, it would severely weaken US influence in the Indo-Pacific region and its surrounding areas,
Opening-day ticket sales for a horror exhibition at the Tainan Art Museum were suspended twice on Saturday as the show attracted too many visitors. Titled “Ghosts and Hells: The Underworld in Asian art,” the exhibition runs until Oct. 16. It is the local version of a show that debuted at the Musee du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris. It was planned and curated by Julien Rousseau. The Tainan museum said that within an hour of its doors opening, more than 1,000 people had entered the exhibition. By noon, 3,000 physical and virtual tickets had been sold, while the museum had more than 4,000
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