Former premier Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) yesterday announced he would run for the chairmanship of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in May, setting up a potential three-way race between Hsieh, incumbent DPP Chairman Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) and former DPP chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) for the leadership.
Speaking to the media before the party’s weekly Central Standing Committee meeting, Hsieh formally announced his bid for the election, saying he could better promote his political vision and initiative and speed up party reform if he was chairman.
Su and Tsai have yet to publicly announce their intention to run, but their eventual participation is widely expected.
Photo: Taipei Times
Su did not comment on the announcement, while Tsai’s office that said that every DPP member has the right to participate in the election.
The senior politician, who is in the moderate wing of the party on China policy, has spent the majority of the past three years advocating his initiative of “two constitutions, different interpretations” (憲法各表), and said the proposal would be the solution to ease bilateral tensions between the DPP and Beijing.
Hsieh has never denied reports of his preference for an alliance with Tsai to go up against Su, who is also believed to be interested in the DPP’s nomination for the presidential election in 2016.
Asked about a “Hsieh-Tsai alliance,” Hsieh reiterated that he still favored a “division of labor” because it would be difficult for a party chairman to serve as a presidential candidate at the same time.
Hsieh repeatedly mentioned his private talks with Tsai about the alliance, but Tsai’s office denied there had been such meetings.
The former premier hinted at his bid in his weekly radio talk show on Tuesday night.
“Entering the election is not an issue to me. Dropping out from the race is,” he said.
During the talk show, Hsieh said his efforts to promote his “two constitutions, different interpretations” initiative for more than three years had finally paid off, with a recent opinion poll showing that 61 percent of respondents supported the proposal as the backbone of the DPP’s China policy.
“That was why I called for the party to organize a China policy debate. The leader of this party must have a clear policy on cross-strait relations,” he said.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
WHAT WAS ALL THAT FOR? Jaw Shaw-kong said that Cheng Li-wen had pushed for more drastic cuts and attacked him, just for the outcome to be nearly identical to his bill The legislature yesterday passed a supplementary budget bill to fund the purchase of separate packages of US military equipment, with the combined amount of spending capped at NT$780 billion (US$24.8 billion). The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) used their legislative majority to pass the bill, which runs until 2033 and has two main funding provisions. One was for NT$300 billion of arms sales already approved by the US for Taiwan on Dec. 17 last year, the other was for NT$480 billion for another arms package expected to be announced by Washington. The bill, which fell short of the NT$1.25
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS