The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) pays too little attention to the traditional sports of Taiwan’s indigenous communities, despite its pledge to promote indigenous welfare, a senior official at a think tank affiliated with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) said yesterday.
The National Policy Foundation’s education, literature and sports division convener Apollo Chen (陳學聖) said that indigenous athletes participating in national sports competitions received NT$6,285 per person last year, far below the average remuneration per participating athlete of NT$8,032.
The sum indigenous athletes received was also lower than the funds given to participants of national sports competitions for junior-high school and university students of NT$10,477 and NT$7,709 respectively, Chen said.
The Sports Administration’s budget for indigenous sports and sports education in indigenous communities was only 1 to 2 percent of its total funding, he said.
The Council of Indigenous Peoples spent less than 1 percent of its budget on conducting and promoting cultural and sports events, as well as annual ceremonies, Chen added.
The DPP is not giving such events the attention it promised when it came to power, Chen said.
The monetary awards for winners at the nation’s largest indigenous sports event in archery were not increased this year, even though it was upgraded from a township-level to a county-level event, he said.
Members of indigenous communities are increasingly moving to cities, where infrastructure for traditional sports is lacking, he said.
Chen said that all six special municipalities should establish indigenous sports centers that would include facilities and training equipment for traditional archery, dancing, wrestling, wood-sawing, javelin throwing and tug-of-war.
This would enable indigenous people living in cities to practice their sports and promote cultural interactions among Taiwanese of diverse backgrounds, Chen said.
There are 77 incidents of Taiwanese travelers going missing in China between January last year and last month, the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) said. More than 40 remain unreachable, SEF Secretary-General Luo Wen-jia (羅文嘉) said on Friday. Most of the reachable people in the more than 30 other incidents were allegedly involved in fraud, while some had disappeared for personal reasons, Luo said. One of these people is Kuo Yu-hsuan (郭宇軒), a 22-year-old Taiwanese man from Kaohsiung who went missing while visiting China in August. China’s Taiwan Affairs Office last month said in a news statement that he was under investigation
An aviation jacket patch showing a Formosan black bear punching Winnie the Pooh has become popular overseas, including at an aviation festival held by the Japan Air Self-Defense Force at the Ashiya Airbase yesterday. The patch was designed last year by Taiwanese designer Hsu Fu-yu (徐福佑), who said that it was inspired by Taiwan’s countermeasures against frequent Chinese military aircraft incursions. The badge shows a Formosan black bear holding a Republic of China flag as it punches Winnie the Pooh — a reference to Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) — who is dressed in red and is holding a honey pot with
Celebrations marking Double Ten National Day are to begin in Taipei today before culminating in a fireworks display in Yunlin County on the night of Thursday next week. To start the celebrations, a concert is to be held at the Taipei Dome at 4pm today, featuring a lineup of award-winning singers, including Jody Chiang (江蕙), Samingad (紀曉君) and Huang Fei (黃妃), Taipei tourism bureau official Chueh Yu-ling (闕玉玲) told a news conference yesterday. School choirs, including the Pqwasan na Taoshan Choir and Hngzyang na Matui & Nahuy Children’s Choir, and the Ministry of National Defense Symphony Orchestra, flag presentation unit and choirs,
China is attempting to subsume Taiwanese culture under Chinese culture by promulgating legislation on preserving documents on ties between the Minnan region and Taiwan, a Taiwanese academic said yesterday. China on Tuesday enforced the Fujian Province Minnan and Taiwan Document Protection Act to counter Taiwanese cultural independence with historical evidence that would root out misleading claims, Chinese-language media outlet Straits Today reported yesterday. The act is “China’s first ad hoc local regulations in the cultural field that involve Taiwan and is a concrete step toward implementing the integrated development demonstration zone,” Fujian Provincial Archives deputy director Ma Jun-fan (馬俊凡) said. The documents
RSS