TURNING A PAGE:The nation should break away from authoritarian brainwashing practices so that democratic values can be realized, an academic said

Taipei Times
Date: Feb 27, 2016
By: Sean Lin / Staff reporter

Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙) was not the nation’s founding father, and statutes stipulating that the president and lawmakers must salute Sun’s portrait at inauguration ceremonies and legislative sessions should be nullified to end the party-state dogma indoctrinated by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), academics said yesterday.

At a Taipei news conference, Taiwan Association of University Professors board director Chen Li-fu (陳俐甫) said that Sun, who died in 1925, was “used” as the nation’s founding father by then-Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairman Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) in 1940 to strengthen his rule over the KMT’s faltering regime in China.

“Why must we submit to the KMT’s will, and not the other way around?” Chen asked.

He said that the term guofu (國父, founding father) was coined by a warlord who addressed Sun that way in an elegiac couplet which he presented to Sun at his funeral, and asked if anyone would take Chinese elegiacal writing — which he said is usually exaggerated — seriously.

“If Sun were alive today, he would be perplexed to hear people call him guofu. In a way, he is also victim of all the criticism we have hurled at him,” Chen said.     [FULL  STORY]