Lu Ching Fu News Today

A friend of mine told me that when he was a child, he once won first place in a speech contest. When he presented the award after returning home, his father threw it to the ground, shouting that it was useless. All his father valued was top performance in exams — nothing else mattered. This obsolete ideology, which prevails in many families in Taiwan, is arguably a legacy of the civil service examination system in imperial China. At a recent cultural conference, film director Wang Hsiao-ti ...

Rapid urban renewal an ugly thing By Lu Ching-fu 呂清夫 Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) said that Taipei is ugly, that it can no longer compare with the most advanced cities in China and, therefore, it is time for the city to speed up its urban renewal. Would urban renewal solve the ugliness problem? Urban renewal in Taiwan is only about replacing old buildings with new ones or applying to build new skyscrapers, but it is not certain that these buildings would be better. As for the uglin...