Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

Taiwan’s pro-unification media outlets and academics all have a rigid formulaic response to any issue related to Taiwan’s difficult international situation: Destroy the relationship between Taiwan and the US and between Taiwan and Japan, and if Washington is friendly to Taipei, slander the US and accuse it of playing the “Taiwan card” as a way of dealing with China.

The subtext of this response is that Taiwan should avoid being used by Washington, that moving closer to the US will only increase China’s pressure on Taiwan and that cross-strait relations should be improved to counterbalance the relationship with the US.

The controversy over the selection of National Taiwan University’s (NTU) president has continued for two or three months, with no resolution in sight. In the study methodology course that I teach at the university, students keep asking whether the paper that NTU president-elect Kuan Chung-ming (管中閔) presented at an academic seminar on May 6 last year really contains any improper citations or plagiarism, as some people have claimed.

The media have reported that, although the paper coauthored by Kuan and the master’s thesis of a student surnamed Chang (張) were written by different authors, a number of diagrams in the two contain the same information. However, both papers say that the diagrams were compiled and drawn by the researchers separately.