Many Taiwanese said that the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) favors big business and has strayed from its core ideals since assuming power three years ago, a Chinese-language newspaper poll reported yesterday as the party celebrated its 17th anniversary.
The survey by the United Daily News, one of the nation's largest papers, said that 31 percent of those polled were unsatisfied with the way the party has governed. This was a big drop from the 51 percent who were satisfied with the party during its first month of rule, the paper said.
Yesterday's poll said that before the DPP became the ruling party, 47 percent of those polled thought that the party served the interests of workers and the underprivileged. But only 23 percent said they believe this now, the survey said.
The poll reported that before the party took office, 11 percent of those surveyed said that the party was biased toward big business. Now 43 percent said that the DPP favors large corporations the most, the survey said.
The survey's release follows two major protests in recent weeks staged by railway and telecom workers who oppose the government's plans to privatize their companies. The workers fear they'll lose their jobs, but the DPP has promised it would try to protect the workers' interests as the state-run firms are made profitable.
DPP Deputy Secretary-General Lee Ying-yuan (
``We kept close contacts with business people because we needed to win their support of our reform bills,'' Lee told TVBS cable news.
The poll results will likely worry President Chen Shui-bian (
Several polls have reported that he is trailing Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Lien Chan (
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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