Premier Yu Shyi-kun yesterday appointed Cabinet Spokesman Chuang Suo-hang (莊碩漢) as the head of the Overseas Chinese Commission, effective Saturday.
The position has been empty since last September, when Chen Rong-jye (
Since Chuang's successor has not yet been named, Cabinet Secretary-General Liu Shih-fang (
One frontrunner for the position is Government Information Office Director-General Arthur Iap (
Iap, however, told the Taipei Times yesterday that he has no interest in the job.
"If I were interested, I would've taken it as soon as it was offered," he said.
Although Yu was tightlipped about the shift yesterday, he hinted that he was leaning toward Iap for the spokesman's post during the year-end banquet with the media at the Executive Yuan on Monday night.
"He might change his mind and take up the Cabinet spokesman job if you guys jointly sign a petition imploring him to do it," Yu said, jokingly.
Chuang, on the other hand, seemed happy about his move to the commission post.
"I accepted the premier's offer right on the spot when he quizzed me on the matter on Monday night," he said.
Chuang, 48, referred to the spokesperson position as the "fax machine of the premier" when he took the job a year ago. At the time he was vice chairman of the Tai-wan Provincial Government.
Chuang served as political vice minister of the Ministry of Civil Service between 1996 and 2000.
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:
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