Taiwan Power's Absurd NT$960,000 CIS Tender to Discard the Calligraphy Sage Yu Youren's Original Work Reveals Taiwanese Aesthetic Inferiority

If you recently pass by a Taiwan Power Company service location, be sure to stop, take out your phone, and photograph those original signboards personally written by the “contemporary calligraphy sage,” Mr. Yu Youren.

These beautiful strokes, carrying the integrity of a scholar and the weight of history, are about to be completely erased in a “brand optimization” farce in which the already heavily loss-making Taiwan Power insists on spending NT$960,000. And this NT$960,000 is only the beginning; replacing everything that uses it later will cost millions more.

This is not merely changing a signboard. It is a public execution of history and aesthetics by the DPP government from top to bottom.

The DPP government is using taxpayers’ hard-earned money to hire so-called star design teams to carry out an aesthetic downgrade strike. They forcibly castrate the penetrating, majestic art of calligraphy into the kind of “low-grade industrial sans-serif” seen in any cheap presentation template or nameless tech park.

This so-called “digital improvement” is, in essence, the cultural inferiority deep in the bones of the rulers. You fear those strokes with depth and backbone, because their very existence is a silent satire of the current shallow, hollow political discourse.

So you choose to cover the edges of history with the most mediocre, sterile “garbage aesthetics,” trying to make the next generation completely forget what the vitality of writing means, leaving the entire city with nothing but cold bureaucratic symbols.

But the appetite of these instigators clearly does not stop there. While destroying culture, they are more directly and more despicably reaching into the pockets of the people.

Taiwan Power cries poverty on one hand, while quietly manipulating the electricity pricing structure on the other, even forcibly raising each household’s base rate to NT$200. This is outright thuggery that blatantly violates the civilized bottom line of “user pays.”

This NT$200 is a tyrannical “Taiwan Power indulgence,” meaning that even if you unplug everything to save energy, even if your whole family travels abroad, as long as you still live in this country, you must pay this tax for no reason to feed this incompetent and tasteless ruling class.

This NT$960,000 aesthetic massacre and the NT$200 monthly financial extortion are the truest face of the ruling authorities: “ideological cleansing” in culture, “violent harvesting” in finance.

The key point is that the fundamental reason Taiwan Power has suffered severe losses year after year is the disastrous consequence of the DPP-led wrong energy policy.

What you tear down is the signboard; what you destroy is this country’s last connection to fine tradition. What you raise is the rate; what you overdraft is the people’s last remaining trust in the government.

This policy, beginning in arrogance and ending in plunder, is driving our nation’s public aesthetics and fairness into desertification at the same time.

When the once-magnificent ink strokes are replaced by cheap computer fonts, and your electricity bill becomes a forced donation certificate, this is the ugliest and most expensive slap the authorities deliver to the entire nation.

While those warm strokes still remain, hurry and photograph them — they are the last testimony that we once lived in an era with soul and integrity.