As the KMT set ups a special reform committee after its unprecedented loss in the presidential elections, voices inside and outside the party appear anything but unified on how such reforms should proceed.
KMT provincial party chairman Chen Keng-chin (
With the downsizing of the provincial government, there is no need for the KMT's provincial-level organization, said Chen.
Instead, he said, the KMT should strengthen party organizations at the county and township level and bolster grassroots support for the party.
There have been a number of calls for reduction in the KMT's organizational structure, but they have gone unheeded, said Chen. If the elections for National Assembly delegates are cancelled, the KMT should be able to abolish the provincial party headquarters within months, he said.
If the assembly elections -- scheduled for May 20 -- are not cancelled, then the KMT will be hard pressed to liquidate the provincial party machinery in the face of pressures to field candidates for the elections, said Chen.
Speaking on a TV talk show yesterday, National Taiwan University political scientist Pao Tsung-ho (
Meaningful party reform must include democratic processes within the party and greater attention towards public opinion, said Pao.
The KMT should first take stock of its members, set a timetable for adopting democratic internal methods, and then hold elections for the party chairman and other party posts, stressed Pao.
Not so, countered KMT legislator Chen Shei-saint (
The KMT should first place its assets in a trust and then institute democratic methods within the party, said Chen.
But the KMT should stop short of a party purge.
"Those who should have left have already done so," said Chen.
EUROPEAN TARGETS: The planned Munich center would support TSMC’s European customers to design high-performance, energy-efficient chips, an executive said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, yesterday said that it plans to launch a new research-and-development (R&D) center in Munich, Germany, next quarter to assist customers with chip design. TSMC Europe president Paul de Bot made the announcement during a technology symposium in Amsterdam on Tuesday, the chipmaker said. The new Munich center would be the firm’s first chip designing center in Europe, it said. The chipmaker has set up a major R&D center at its base of operations in Hsinchu and plans to create a new one in the US to provide services for major US customers,
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday said that it would redesign the written portion of the driver’s license exam to make it more rigorous. “We hope that the exam can assess drivers’ understanding of traffic rules, particularly those who take the driver’s license test for the first time. In the past, drivers only needed to cram a book of test questions to pass the written exam,” Minister of Transportation and Communications Chen Shih-kai (陳世凱) told a news conference at the Taoyuan Motor Vehicle Office. “In the future, they would not be able to pass the test unless they study traffic regulations
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