Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus convener Sufin Siluko (廖國棟) yesterday urged KMT Chairwoman Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱) to step down over the party leadership’s controversial passage of a motion to move next year’s KMT chairperson election forward by two months.
Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of a legislative plenary session, Sufin said the decision at last week’s KMT Central Standing Committee meeting to exclude members on leaves of absence violated party regulations.
“As a party caucus, we play by the [legislature’s] rules on procedure on a daily basis,” Sufin said. “The KMT’s regulations do not allow the chairwoman to exclude committee members on leaves of absence as eligible participants in order to reach a quorum.”
Lauding a civil suit filed by committee member Yao Chiang-lin (姚江臨) on Monday, which seeks to invalidate the motion, as being “based on reasonable grounds,” Sufin said KMT headquarters should respect the system and adhere to regulations, because a failure to do so could result in the party falling apart.
“A party leader blatantly flaunting the law and the party’s internal regulations is enough to warrant calling for them to step down,” he said.
On Wednesday last week, Hung railroaded the motion to move up the election through the committee, despite less than half of the 40 eligible participants being in attendance, as KMT regulations stipulate that 20 is the minimum requirement for a quorum.
Hung reportedly cited regulations promulgated by the Ministry of the Interior to change the quorum requirement by excluding members on leaves of absence from the total number of members when calculating a quorum.
The motion, unveiled by KMT Central Policy Committee director Alex Tsai (蔡正元) on Dec. 19, aims to move the chairperson election from July 20 to May 20 next year to conform with the party charter and eliminate separate elections for party representatives by the Huang Fu-hsing military veterans’ branch.
Hung was elected party chairwoman on March 26 to serve the remainder of the term which started when former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) was re-elected on July 20, 2013.
Ma resigned on Dec. 3, 2014, to take responsibility for the KMT’s dramatic defeat in the nine-in-one local elections in November 2014.
He was succeeded by New Taipei City Mayor Eric Chu (朱立倫) on Jan. 19 last year, who resigned nearly a year later on Jan. 16 after losing the presidential election to the Democratic Progressive Party’s candidate, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文).
Separately yesterday, former vice president Wu Den-yih (吳敦義), also of the KMT, said during a trip to Kaohsiung that as any major changes implemented by KMT headquarters could have profound and far-reaching effects on the whole party, they should be subject to thorough deliberation.
“Any proposed changes should also be subject to approval by the party’s highest decisionmaking body, the Central Standing Committee ... and cannot be decided by just one person,” Wu said.
The manner in which the motion was passed last week demonstrated that some KMT cadres have the wrong impression that major changes can be decided by a small group of people, he said.
It also showed thoughtlessness and a lack of proper prior communication, Wu said, adding that significant problems have been caused when KMT headquarters passes motions boycotted by committee members.
“The current situation is detrimental to party unity... The party chairwoman and members of the committee should begin negotiations as soon as possible, and work out a proper solution,” he said.
AGING: As of last month, people aged 65 or older accounted for 20.06 percent of the total population and the number of couples who got married fell by 18,685 from 2024 Taiwan has surpassed South Korea as the country least willing to have children, with an annual crude birthrate of 4.62 per 1,000 people, Ministry of the Interior data showed yesterday. The nation was previously ranked the second-lowest country in terms of total fertility rate, or the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime. However, South Korea’s fertility rate began to recover from 2023, with total fertility rate rising from 0.72 and estimated to reach 0.82 to 0.85 by last year, and the crude birthrate projected at 6.7 per 1,000 people. Japan’s crude birthrate was projected to fall below six,
US President Donald Trump in an interview with the New York Times published on Thursday said that “it’s up to” Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) what China does on Taiwan, but that he would be “very unhappy” with a change in the “status quo.” “He [Xi] considers it to be a part of China, and that’s up to him what he’s going to be doing, but I’ve expressed to him that I would be very unhappy if he did that, and I don’t think he’ll do that. I hope he doesn’t do that,” Trump said. Trump made the comments in the context
SELF-DEFENSE: Tokyo has accelerated its spending goal and its defense minister said the nation needs to discuss whether it should develop nuclear-powered submarines China is ramping up objections to what it sees as Japan’s desire to acquire nuclear weapons, despite Tokyo’s longstanding renunciation of such arms, deepening another fissure in the two neighbors’ increasingly tense ties. In what appears to be a concerted effort, China’s foreign and defense ministries issued statements on Thursday condemning alleged remilitarism efforts by Tokyo. The remarks came as two of the country’s top think tanks jointly issued a 29-page report framing actions by “right-wing forces” in Japan as posing a “serious threat” to world peace. While that report did not define “right-wing forces,” the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs was
PREPAREDNESS: Given the difficulty of importing ammunition during wartime, the Ministry of National Defense said it would prioritize ‘coproduction’ partnerships A newly formed unit of the Marine Corps tasked with land-based security operations has recently replaced its aging, domestically produced rifles with more advanced, US-made M4A1 rifles, a source said yesterday. The unnamed source familiar with the matter said the First Security Battalion of the Marine Corps’ Air Defense and Base Guard Group has replaced its older T65K2 rifles, which have been in service since the late 1980s, with the newly received M4A1s. The source did not say exactly when the upgrade took place or how many M4A1s were issued to the battalion. The confirmation came after Chinese-language media reported
RSS