Vilification of president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) by people who favor unification with China would not taint the legacy and achievements he has left for Taiwan, Taiwan Society chairman Li Chuan-hsin (李川信) said yesterday.
Li made the remarks at the Taipei Guest House, where a memorial has been set up to allow people to pay tribute to Lee, who died on Thursday last week aged 97.
“In a democratic society, we are all free to hold different ideologies and viewpoints, but people can respect each other’s stance,” Li said alongside members of affiliated groups the Northern Taiwan Society and the Taiwan Society Hakka.
Photo: Tu Chien-jung, Taipei Times
However, pro-unification forces and their spokespeople have launched attacks to smear the former president, but they cannot take away Lee’s work to consolidate a Taiwanese consciousness and bring about a nation of freedom, Li said.
“These people enjoy democracy and autonomy that resulted from President Lee’s pursuit of his lifetime goals, but they are in betrayal for not identifying with Taiwan,” he said. “These attacks will not succeed, they will not taint the achievements and the legacy that he left for Taiwan.”
Lee pushed for education to focus more on Taiwan’s own history and culture, and for schools to use the Getting to Know Taiwan textbooks from 1998, through which studying Taiwanese history became mainstream, he said.
Lee greatly contributed to the democratization, self-rule and indigenization of education, he said.
Separately, leading figures from the Taiwan Graduate School of Theology and the Presbyterian Church of Taiwan also paid their respects to Lee.
Graduate School of Theology principal Tsai Tzu-lun (蔡慈倫) said that her institute had awarded Lee an honorary doctorate, as he had not only contributed to Taiwan’s democracy, but was also a pragmatic theologian who left a legacy that was a testimony to God’s work.
“Lee often struggled with his old self, even after becoming a new person, which is a fitting explanation for his famous words: ‘The self does not just mean me’ (我不是我的我),” Graduate School of Theology professor Lin Hung-hsin (林鴻信) said.
Former Graduate School of Theology principal Chen Shang-jen (陳尚仁) said that when Lee was young “he felt the divine calling him to be a minister, and at times felt he had this as unfinished business.”
“We told him that a Christian minister can also be a nation’s leader and that he had already devoted his whole life to our nation,” Chen said.
According to official records, since the memorial opened on Saturday last week, more than 15,282 had visited as of yesterday.
Additional reporting by Lee Hsin-fang
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