It was not the first time Premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) lied to the public, when he was asked on Friday to confirm whether he has appointed Minister Without Portfolio Chiang Been-huang (蔣丙煌) to succeed former minister of Health and Welfare Chiu Wen-ta (邱文達) after Chiu resigned over the most recent cooking oil scandal.
However, it was the first time Jiang was caught lying on the spot.
While Jiang was telling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Cheng Li-chiun (鄭麗君) at a legislative question-and-answer session that he could not comment on the matter because the consultation process was still ongoing, Executive Yuan spokesperson Sun Lih-chyun (孫立群) announced Chiang’s appointment.
Later at the same meeting, Jiang appears to have lied again, when he told Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lo Shu-lei (羅淑蕾) that he never said there could be more tainted cooking oil products that remain to be found. That contradicts what he told KMT Legislator Alex Fai (費鴻泰) on Tuesday, when he described the problematic products as “unexploded bombs” — as recorded by the legislature’s video system.
Jiang also lied about Chiu’s resignation two weeks ago.
At 10:40pm on Oct. 3, following Chiu’s 8pm press conference, the Executive Yuan issued a press release saying that Jiang approved of Chiu’s offer to resign at noon that day, while earlier that afternoon, Jiang told DPP Legislator Tsai Huang-liang (蔡煌瑯) that he had not yet made a decision about it.
Since Jiang was appointed premier in February last year, he has built a history of lies.
In July, when Jiang rejected a charge of attempted murder leveled against him over the violent removal of demonstrators from the Executive Yuan complex early on March 24, the premier told prosecutors that he had not ordered the eviction, because he was asleep at the time. That ran counter to his statement at a press conference that morning that he had stayed up until very late that night watching live broadcasts on different TV news channels.
Not to mention his claims that the eviction resulted in more injuries among police officers than among protesters and that the police urged participants to leave by gently tapping on their shoulders, rather than resorting to force.
Many more cases could be added to the list.
When public pressure has forced Jiang to drop his opposition to a number of issues — such as holding a referendum on the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Gongliao District (貢寮) and making the cross-strait service trade agreement subject to a legislative vote on each of its constituent articles, among others — he says that he had never opposed the ideas in the first place and blames what he calls misinterpretation by the media.
The crackdown on protesters at the Executive Yuan ruined the respect that many of Jiang’s students had for him since he was a professor of political philosophy teaching German-born political theorist Hannah Arendt’s work at National Taiwan University. At that time, more than 700 students and alumni said that Jiang’s words and actions since becoming premier showed that he had abandoned the faith that intellectuals of social conscience should keep.
This serves as another example of how Jiang has failed to implement Arendt’s philosophy in politics. Arendt, condemning dishonesty in politics, said: “Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings.”
The image was oddly quiet. No speeches, no flags, no dramatic announcements — just a Chinese cargo ship cutting through arctic ice and arriving in Britain in October. The Istanbul Bridge completed a journey that once existed only in theory, shaving weeks off traditional shipping routes. On paper, it was a story about efficiency. In strategic terms, it was about timing. Much like politics, arriving early matters. Especially when the route, the rules and the traffic are still undefined. For years, global politics has trained us to watch the loud moments: warships in the Taiwan Strait, sanctions announced at news conferences, leaders trading
The saga of Sarah Dzafce, the disgraced former Miss Finland, is far more significant than a mere beauty pageant controversy. It serves as a potent and painful contemporary lesson in global cultural ethics and the absolute necessity of racial respect. Her public career was instantly pulverized not by a lapse in judgement, but by a deliberate act of racial hostility, the flames of which swiftly encircled the globe. The offensive action was simple, yet profoundly provocative: a 15-second video in which Dzafce performed the infamous “slanted eyes” gesture — a crude, historically loaded caricature of East Asian features used in Western
Is a new foreign partner for Taiwan emerging in the Middle East? Last week, Taiwanese media reported that Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Francois Wu (吳志中) secretly visited Israel, a country with whom Taiwan has long shared unofficial relations but which has approached those relations cautiously. In the wake of China’s implicit but clear support for Hamas and Iran in the wake of the October 2023 assault on Israel, Jerusalem’s calculus may be changing. Both small countries facing literal existential threats, Israel and Taiwan have much to gain from closer ties. In his recent op-ed for the Washington Post, President William
A stabbing attack inside and near two busy Taipei MRT stations on Friday evening shocked the nation and made headlines in many foreign and local news media, as such indiscriminate attacks are rare in Taiwan. Four people died, including the 27-year-old suspect, and 11 people sustained injuries. At Taipei Main Station, the suspect threw smoke grenades near two exits and fatally stabbed one person who tried to stop him. He later made his way to Eslite Spectrum Nanxi department store near Zhongshan MRT Station, where he threw more smoke grenades and fatally stabbed a person on a scooter by the roadside.
RSS