Wilson Tien (
Tien believes that Taipei City can be better than it is now, and he has decided to dive into the year-end elections as a DPP Taipei City councilor candidate for the Sungshan and Hsinyi districts.
PHOTO: CHEN CHENG-CHANG, TAIPEI TIMES
"I am deeply disappointed with the way Taipei has been governed by Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (
Tien said that the city's traffic gets congested long before the beginning of rush hour, often as early as 2pm.
Tien says that Taipei's traffic has not improved much even though the city has the MRT.
"And then, there's the attitude of Ma's government and his problem-solving skills regarding Nari," Tien said.
"It really angers me that Ma took no responsibility but simply blamed Mother Nature for the mess and the destruction suffered by the city."
Tien was referring to Typhoon Nari, which hit Taiwan between Sept. 16 and Sept. 19 last year. The storm caused the worst flooding in five decades in Taipei City and claimed the lives of 27 Taipei residents.
Nari flooded more than 4,000 basements across the city, damaged vital equipment and paralyzed the operations of the MRT.
"Maybe the city councilors haven't been doing their job very well. They have failed to point out these faults to the city government. That's why the city's residents are not aware of the inefficiency of Ma's government," Tien said when talking about why he is running for a Taipei City councilor seat.
Regarded by many as one of the DPP's rising stars, Tien is also notable because -- as a second generation mainlander who supports Taiwan's independence -- he comes to the party with a slightly different background than most of his DPP colleagues.
"My reason for my stand is clear and simple," the 40 year-old Tien said.
"I don't see how [Taiwan's] unification with China will bring Taiwan any good."
Educated at National Taiwan University and Indiana University, Tien wrote a book in 1995 titled Taiwan, My Only Motherland (
"Taiwan is the only place I dream about and identify with," Tien was once quoted as saying in an interview.
Once the DPP's former director of its International Affairs Department, Tien was also the former secretary-general of the Goa-Seng-Lang Association for Taiwan Independence (外省人獨立促進會), a group made up of mainlanders -- including current secretary-general of the Presidential Office Chen Shih-meng (陳師孟) and DPP Legislator Dung Yi-kang (段宜康) -- who share a pro-independence ideology.
"Of Taiwan's 400-year history, who is not an immigrant in this country anyway?" Tien asked, noting that more than 80 percent of the population are descendants of Chinese who moved to Taiwan as far back as 400 years ago -- mainly from Fujian Province.
"The thing that made the so-called waishengren -- the term used to refer to mainlanders who fled to Taiwan with the KMT in 1949 -- stand out more than others, is the fact that so many of them arrived at once," Tien said, adding that the exodus consisted of approximately one million people.
Seeing as how Taiwan's population was -- before the KMT arrived -- around 6 million, the in-coming group made up one sixth of Taiwan's population, Tien said.
Tien thinks that if the ethnic issue wasn't over-politicized in Taiwan, inter-marriage and the assimilation of cultural and social differences between mainlanders and Taiwanese would create a more harmonious society.
China's policy towards Taiwan also contributes to the ongoing distrust between mainlanders and native Taiwanese, Tien said.
"China's efforts to marginalize Taiwan, internationally and its threat of using force to `reunify' Taiwan has meant that anyone who expressed any affinity for China would be seen as a traitor in Taiwan," he said.
However, Tien is optimistic that, with time, the ethnicity problem will subside as the two groups converge.
"Strictly speaking, waishengren is not an ethnic group because they, unlike the Hakka, do not share a common religion, speak a common language or share a common history," Tien said.
"So it will be hard for them to continue to identify with China for a long time."
"I think in the future, within five to 10 years' time, the term `mainlander' will become blurred and it will be hard to tell whether someone is a mainlander or not," Tien said.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not