President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) yesterday attacked Taipei City Mayor Ma Ying-jeou's (馬英九) leadership, saying that the low efficiency of Ma's administration had reversed the improvement in the quality of the life the city enjoyed when Chen was mayor.
"As a resident of the city, I can't just sit aside to watch the city's living standards continuously decline under Ma's administration," Chen said when visiting DPP mayoral candidate Lee Ying-yuan's (
The president said that the leader of the city should aim to compete with the world's greatest cities instead of just aiming to be better than other cities and counties in Taiwan.
"Taipei City had never ranked in top 10 cities in Asiaweek surveys before I became city mayor in 1994," Chen said. "However, as a result of my administration's efforts, our city rose to 10th in the rankings, then progressed to fifth, and finally ranked second in the last year of my term," the president said.
Taipei City had now fallen to fourth, he said, and the Economist magazine ranked Taipei 60th in a survey of 130 cities.
"This result reflects a fact," he said. "It is that the Taipei City government has come to a standstill and is failing to perform as well as it did."
"The screws of the city government mechanism have become loose and even fallen off," he said.
Chen also partly blamed the decrease in the country's competitiveness on the deterioration of the Taipei City government, which he said had forced him to pay more attention to the city's affairs.
Lee Ying-yuan also criticized the mayor, accusing Ma of disrespecting not only Chen but also former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝), who he said had been instrumental in Ma's success in the 1998 mayoral election.
"President Lee raised Mr. Ma's hand to boost Ma's support," Lee Ying-yuan said. "But within a year, Ma led an illegal protest to directly force the former president to step down [as KMT chairman].
"How could Ma treat the former president in such an incredibly rude manner?" he said.
Lee also attacked Ma for being a liar.
"Mayor Ma twice rejected Presidential Office invitations to give a briefing on his Hong Kong trip to President Chen, but he told the public that he had made a short briefing to President Chen privately during a public occasion," Lee said.
"Actually, the `briefing' which Ma talked about was a roughly 30-second conversation during a funeral ceremony in which they said three sentences to each other," Lee said.
Ma, who Chen described as "China's Taipei Special Region chief," said yesterday he would like to make a trip to China if he is re-elected.
"I have never met with any high-ranking officials from China's communist authorities," he said. "However, for for the sake of a prosperous Taipei City and Taiwan, I would like to visit China when the government eases restriction on cross-strait laws and regulations."
He also described Chen's and the DPP's accusations that he was not patriotic as "ridiculous."
"The only comments that can be made about my loyalty to the Republic of China is `I am too patriotic,' and I will not be afraid of negotiating with mainland China just because of opponents' attacks," he said.
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