Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei mayoral candidate Sean Lien (連勝文) has created a controversy with a donation to victims of the gas pipeline explosions in Greater Kaohsiung, casting doubt on his ability to be a good mayor.
Following the disaster in Greater Kaohsiung on Thursday night and Friday morning last week, Lien’s campaign office announced that it would cease campaign activities for three days and donate the saved expenses — approximately NT$100,000 (US$3,300) — to aid the victims.
The announcement drew criticism from some people, who said that the amount was too small considering the wealth of Lien and his family. Others compared the donation to one his father, former vice president Lien Chan (連戰), made to victims of the Sichuan earthquake in 2008, reportedly NT$10 million.
Responding to the criticism, Lien’s office said the NT$100,000 had been donated by office chairman Chen Chiung-sung (陳炯松), and then on Sunday, it announced that Sean Lien would donate NT$2 million to first responders injured in the explosions.
KMT Legislator Alex Tsai (蔡正元), who serves as Sean Lien’s campaign executive director, said that Lien Chan did not actually make the NT$10 million donation in 2008, but merely helped to forward the donation from Taiwanese entrepreneur Kenneth Yen (嚴凱泰) — a statement Lien Chan has not contradicted.
The way that Sean Lien and his campaign team have turned an act of goodwill — that should have been a good public relations move — into a controversy might make voters wonder whether he and his team are capable of running the biggest city in the nation.
Sean Lien is not the only person — and not the only candidate for the Nov. 29 nine-in-one elections — to make donations to Kaohsiung’s relief efforts, but he is the only one who has drawn controversy by doing so.
He had already caused doubts about his credibility by proposing to make the elevated Xinsheng Expressway into a tunnel highway, although the expressway was constructed above a covered river.
In a campaign speech, he spoke about the “three mountains in Taipei” — Huashan (華山), Songshan (松山) and Zhongshan (中山), but although the word shan (山) means “mountain” in Mandarin, the three are merely names of areas in the city, not actual mountains.
Sean Lien has also said that Han Chinese settlers had worked to develop Taipei into a city “since the time of Cheng Cheng-kung” (鄭成功), although Cheng, a Ming Dynasty loyalist also known as Koxinga, died in 1662, only a year after his troops occupied what is now Greater Tainan, and never set foot in Taipei.
There is no record of Han Chinese settlement in Taipei until 1709, more than four decades after Cheng’s death. Such remarks ignore the dozens — if not hundreds — of Aboriginal villages that existed in Taipei generations before the arrival of Han Chinese.
While the donation controversy raises questions about Sean Lien’s ability to handle crises, the latter examples demonstrate his lack of knowledge about the city he hopes to lead as mayor.
Therefore, it is no surprise that a member of Sean Lien’s campaign office has privately told journalists that he is worried about his candidate’s chances of being elected.
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