Cross-strait educational exchanges should not be conducted in a manner that undermines Taiwan’s national dignity, Minister of Education Pan Wen-chung (潘文忠) said yesterday, after a visiting student program reportedly planned by the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) youth wing was held in Taipei last week.
The Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister paper) yesterday reported that a group of Chinese students on March 11 visited the Taipei Municipal Minzu Elementary School as part of an educational program organized by the Young Pioneers of China (YPC) and the All China Taiwanese Association.
The program, called the Cross-strait Peace Angels’ Exchange Visits, featured mutual visits by elementary-school students from Taipei and Shanghai, the report said.
Photo: screen grab from the Internet
Before the Chinese students visited Taipei for a five-day trip last week, a group of Taiwanese students first visited them in Shanghai in July last year, it said, adding that the event is now in its 16th year.
YPC has close links to the CCP. Its chair, Fu Zhenbang (傅振邦), is the secretary of the Communist Youth League (CYL) of China’s central committee secretariat, the report said
Former Chinese president Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (李克強) had both served as secretary of the league’s central committee secretariat while doubling as YPC chair, the report said.
Meanwhile, as stated on its Web site, the All China Taiwanese Association’s goal is to bring about peaceful unification across the Taiwan Strait and to promote the “one country, two systems” framework, the report said.
The program is backed by the CCP and apparently not purely educational, Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Huang Kuo-shu (黃國書) told the Liberty Times.
The Ministry of Education and the Mainland Affairs Council must carefully filter exchanges, since China is seeking to promote unification in every possible way, he said.
That the Taipei City Government would tolerate the CYL’s activities on campus suggests that Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) has gone too far with his belief that “both sides of the Taiwan Strait are one family,” Huang said, referring to Ko’s controversial comment in 2017.
Asked to comment on the program at the Legislative Yuan, Pan said it has passed the review of an interministerial meeting convened by the Ministry of the Interior last year.
It is a standard procedure for reviewing exchanges that involve the Chinese government or its armed forces, he added.
The ministry respects and supports all cross-strait educational exchanges, but they “should be purely educational,” he said.
Involving issues such as unification and independence in those events is unnecessary and could hinder student’s learning opportunities, he said.
Educational exchanges should be conducted in an equal and reciprocal manner, without undermining the nation’s dignity, he added.
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