Despite the official decision announced by the KMT and PFP headquarters to drop the idea of forming an Alliance Policy-making Committee (國親聯盟決策委員會) as the supreme policy-making body of their political alliance, some members from both parties expressed their opposition to the move.
These party members expressed concern that the move to abort the committee would have a negative impact on the pan-blue alliance's presidential bid next March.
KMT Chairman Lien Chan (
Instead, said KMT spokesman Alex Tsai (
According to PFP spokesman Hwang Yih-jiau (黃義交), the eight panels will each responsible for issues concerning the legislature, politics, publicity, campaign affairs, cross-strait affairs, finance and economy, education and culture, and administration.
Each panel will be co-convened by a KMT and a PFP representative and an additional panel could be established when it is deemed necessary, Hwang said.
Soong added that although he and Lien will be responsible for all decisions under the new system, any policy they come up with will still have to be supported by their own parties.
Noting that there is a fundamental difference in the function of the policy-making committee and the panels, KMT Legislator Apollo Chen (
"While the main role of these panels is to manage technical details concerning the presidential campaign for the two leaders, the policy-making committee was to be in charge of making strategic planning decisions on all campaigned-related issues," Apollo Chen said.
"It's rather weird, I think, to not have a policy-making body but to have both Lien and Soong play the role of strategic planners while at the same time the two will be the ones fighting the actual fight," Apollo Chen said, referring to the presidential race.
PFP Legislator Lee Hung-chun (
"I don't think it will be good for the alliance's presidential campaign to have both Lien and Soong dragged to the frontline all the time," Lee said.
"To simply abort the committee is not going quash the rumor," added Apollo Chen, referring to media speculation which suggested that the parties decided to drop the committee because there was severe infighting among party heavyweights vying for certain positions within the alliance. Such speculation had been denied by KMT Secretary-General Lin Feng-Cheng (
While it is hard to finger which party initiated the idea to have the committee dropped, PFP Legislator Liu Wen-hsiung (
The committee had been aborted to settle the issue, Liu said.
Liu also opposes the idea of having the eight panels substitute for the policy-making committee noting that such a move will only make issues more complicated.
"If media speculation is true, then the issue over party members vying for certain positions will remain whether or not there is a policy-making committee or joint panels," Apollo Chen said.
"The greatest problem facing the KMT-PFP alliance is not [infighting] itself but the intention to sweep the problem under the carpet and pretend that it doesn't exist," Apollo Chen 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