KMT Chairman Lien Chan (連戰) yesterday ordered an investigation into a recent case in which a former party official defected to the DPP.
The maverick, Liu Sen-tong (
Liu officially joined the DPP on Sunday. He reportedly has mailed his KMT membership card back to the party.
Chen Kang-chin (
Chen said any members involving in conduct harmful to the party are subject to expulsion.
Liu, a former legislator, originally planned to join the TSU after he failed to win the KMT's nomination for the Kaohsiung County commissioner election last year. The KMT offered to appoint him to head the Kaohsiung branch office in an effort to make him stay.
KMT Vice Chairman Wu Poh-hsiung (
On Sunday, Liu said his accession to the Tang Eng chairmanship indicated that he had quit politics to enter business, urging the public not to play up his move to join the DPP.
Liu denied he had done so under pressure from the DPP and said the decision had come at the spur of the moment because many people happened to plan to join the DPP on that day.
Also, Liu did not think his conduct would do a great harm to the party, though he believed his departure might push the KMT to do some soul-searching.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift