Taiwan Church News
3433 Edition
December 11 – 17, 2017
Church Ministry
Passed Is The Act On Promoting Transitional Justice
Reported by Chiu Kuo-rong
In the evening on December 5, The Act On Promoting Transitional Justice, a history-making act which was strongly urged by PCT at the 70th anniversary of 228 massacre, was finally passed in Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan.
Responding to some media’s twisted complaints that a huge budget will be wasted to do the unnecessary jobs of name-changing only, Rev Zeng Kuo-chong, director of PCT’s Church and Society Committee, remarked that the spirit of this act is to eradicate all the public symbols or objects implicating those authoritarian rulings under the regime of Nationalist Party(KMT).
Therefore, it is a common sense for Taiwan society and church to abolish any title or wordings, named after KMT’s authoritarian figures like Chaing Kai-sheik or Sun Yat-sen, Rev Cheng urged, adding that any church named after these KMT political idols should proceed to change if a consensus could be reached within the session of the elders.
Rev Zeng expressed that those KMT authoritarian symbols and objects, like the wordings, emblems, statues, sculptures and even the gigantic Chiang Kai-sheik memorial hall at Taipei, were embedded into the Taiwanese public space too much to get rid of them at once.
Since The Act On Promoting Transitional Justice has been passed as the general will of all Taiwanese, we need to comply with the act thoroughly to remove all authoritarian symbols still existed in our democratic society, Rev Zeng advised, otherwise we would be still haunted by the those KMT authoritarian ghosts without a peace!
Translated by Peter Wolfe
