Taipei Municipal Zhongshan Girls’ High School yesterday pushed back against “objectifying” remarks Chinese Internet users made about its students after Chinese table tennis champion Ma Long (馬龍) visited the school last month.
Ma toured the school as part of a cross-strait exchange organized by the Ma Ying-jeou Foundation, but Chinese social media users said it was like “a monk entering the den of spider demons.”
The comments were referring to a scene in the novel Journey to the West during which a coven of succubus-like spirits attempted to tempt and devour the monk-pilgrim Xuanzang (玄奘).
Photo: Screen grab from Tsai Ing-wen’s Facebook page
School principal Chang Yun-fen (張云棻) yesterday said the school condemns the inappropriate comments and untruthful stories about its students on social media and certain news outlets.
“The faculty and parents of this school reject the inappropriate language used to objectify women and condemn the harmful comments,” she said. “Targeting innocent Zhongshan students can never be tolerated.”
The school has taken the necessary measures to deal with the incident and sternly warned against false reports on the students’ conduct during the Chinese Olympian’s visit, she added.
The Zhongshan Girls’ High School parents’ association also issued a statement saying the spread of images showing some of the students and the exaggerations by Chinese outlets have caused emotional distress and reputational harm.
Foundation chief executive Hsiao Hsu-tsen (蕭旭岑) said that the public should refrain from politicizing the incident over improper remarks made by random Internet users.
Separately, former president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), who is an alumna of the school, yesterday attended an event celebrating the school’s 127th anniversary and told the students they should aspire to be “women who can brave the world.”
Women must not allow themselves to be defined or limited by others, she said.
ECHOVIRUS 11: The rate of enterovirus infections in northern Taiwan increased last week, with a four-year-old girl developing acute flaccid paralysis, the CDC said Two imported cases of chikungunya fever were reported last week, raising the total this year to 13 cases — the most for the same period in 18 years, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said yesterday. The two cases were a Taiwanese and a foreign national who both arrived from Indonesia, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The 13 cases reported this year are the most for the same period since chikungunya was added to the list of notifiable communicable diseases in October 2007, she said, adding that all the cases this year were imported, including 11 from
Prosecutors in New Taipei City yesterday indicted 31 individuals affiliated with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) for allegedly forging thousands of signatures in recall campaigns targeting three Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers. The indictments stem from investigations launched earlier this year after DPP lawmakers Su Chiao-hui (蘇巧慧) and Lee Kuen-cheng (李坤城) filed criminal complaints accusing campaign organizers of submitting false signatures in recall petitions against them. According to the New Taipei District Prosecutors Office, a total of 2,566 forged recall proposal forms in the initial proposer petition were found during the probe. Among those
The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) today condemned the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) after the Czech officials confirmed that Chinese agents had surveilled Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) during her visit to Prague in March last year. Czech Military Intelligence director Petr Bartovsky yesterday said that Chinese operatives had attempted to create the conditions to carry out a demonstrative incident involving Hsiao, going as far as to plan a collision with her car. Hsiao was vice president-elect at the time. The MAC said that it has requested an explanation and demanded a public apology from Beijing. The CCP has repeatedly ignored the desires
The Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant’s license has expired and it cannot simply be restarted, the Executive Yuan said today, ahead of national debates on the nuclear power referendum. The No. 2 reactor at the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant in Pingtung County was disconnected from the nation’s power grid and completely shut down on May 17, the day its license expired. The government would prioritize people’s safety and conduct necessary evaluations and checks if there is a need to extend the service life of the reactor, Executive Yuan spokeswoman Michelle Lee (李慧芝) told a news conference. Lee said that the referendum would read: “Do