Taiwan's Ministry of Culture Demonstrates KMT Dinosaurs are Alive and Well in Taiwan

Thursday April 04, by Jerome F. Keating Ph.D.

Picture yourself in junior high school in Taiwan in the 1960s and your patriotic teacher announces an essay contest where all students are to write about how great a leader Chiang Kai-shek is and how he loves his country etc. etc. It was a different era but unfortunately there are still some KMT stalwarts who live in that past.

This past week, the Ministry of Culture announced an essay contest with a grand prize of NT$100,000 for the winning essay. The topic was to be on the endearing love of Chiang Kai-shek (CKS) and Soong Mei-ling and how they should be an inspiration for familial love, social education and harmony.

The contest had been barely announced when it began to be mocked as crass, unthinking, living in a different era and hypocritical. The CKS Design contest quickly and repeatedly changed the website to eliminate some of the more horrendous aspects of how could one praise a man who destroyed so many Taiwanese families from 2-28 on through the White Terror.

The outrage continued so that the contest was finally "postponed indefinitely." But many questions remained. Are there really such KMT dinosaurs in Taiwan who still believe all the CKS hype and hypocrisy? Yes! How could they be so blind to what has changed with democracy as to not think that this would cause an uproar?

Regrettably he dinosaurs are still there; not only in the judicial system that sorely needs reform, but in the embarrassing thinking of enough KMT who must have had to sign off on this and believe that it would work.

Minister Lung Ying-tai tried to distance herself from the fall out, but it sounded lame. One can only wonder, what will the dinosaurs think of next?