And this, boys and girls, is why the right is universally pathetic....

[Sephirstein]

"Last week People First Party (PFP) Legislator Chin Wei-chu (�`ŒdŽì) accused a member of the Examination Yuan of ideological bias for emphasizing Taiwan-centered history and geography in a grassroots civil-servant examination.

In a test for low-level civil servants set by the Examination Yuan the sections on national history and geography were composed of questions almost entirely about Taiwan. Many of the examinees were shocked by these "biased" questions, Chin fumed. What they expected to be examined on was the history and geography of a foreign country, not their own.

...

It is to redress this that the Ministry of Education has come up with a draft plan to restructure the high school history syllabus. The plan is to split history into three kinds, Taiwanese history, ancient Chinese history -- everything up to the end of the Ming dynasty -- and world history, which also includes Chinese history from the Ching onward.

...

Because the plan is so sensible, it has, of course, generated huge controversy. Conservatives are outraged over the view of Taiwan encapsulated in the syllabus, that it is somewhere that developed from China, by Chinese but that its history is its own and that China is only a part of that, an influence among many. It is a syllabus which is aimed at developing a "localized" consciousness. As such it is loathed by the unificationists who, appointed in the bad old days for their political loyalty rather than their scholarship, still dominate so much of the educational establishment and who have succeeded in frustrating other attempts to make the school syllabus more Taiwan-centric."

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/edit/archives/2003/09/22/2003068816