National Opera Troupe, and Combined Arts Troupe. All these above mentioned functions of the Council were conducted with a single Council body and decided by the chairperson and the Board. The Council is also asked to promote Taiwanese/Chinese culture internationally, and set up cultural divisions overseas. Although Taiwan is not a very big place geographically, it does have a large population (about 230 million people). Keeping all these functions in one body is not very keeping all the functions working effectively. As we discussed in class, some of the functions in the Councils guideline can be separated to be mandates for setting up separate department in a government (of any level), such as heritage preservation, cultural administrative body and a separate granting agency, such as in Canada, on the federal level of arts and culture, there are Department of Canadian Heritage, Ministry of Canadian Heritage, and the a separate arts granting body, the Canada Council for the Arts. The Taiwanese Council for Cultural Affairs is aware of this, so the Council has been promised recently in the most recent national elections that it is going to evolve into the Ministry of Culture under the Executive Yuan, and a separate arts granting agency, National Culture and Arts Foundation, was established in January 1996.The funding source of the Foundation came from both public budget and private donation. As from the public, upon its establishment, the Foundation was established with the goal of being an arts granting agency that operate with the minimum financial support for the government annually. The objective of the initiation fund is planned to be reached in a ten-year period, to be raised from the private donation and budgets promised from its supervising department, the Council for the Cultural Affairs. The government aimed to gradually withdraw its financial commitment to the Foundation and later the Foundation should mainly operate...
