Chinese officials encouraged the fugitive former chairman of the Tuntex Group, Chen Yu-hao (陳由豪), to announce that he had made a donation of NT$10 million to President Chen Shui-bian's (陳水扁) 2000 election campaign, a local Chinese-language magazine reported.
The latest issue of Win-Win Weekly reported that a group of mid-ranking officials at the Taiwan Affairs Council under the Chinese State Council suggested that the fugitive write letters to the Taiwanese media in a bid to derail the president's reelection campaign.
The officials told Chen Yu-hao that by doing so he would win favor among the authorities in Beijing, the magazine quoted a source close to him as saying.
Chen Shui-bian, in an interview with SET TV on Friday night, said he suspected there might be a group responsible for the fugitive's donation "revelation" but did not say who the group might be.
"Many things can happen during campaigning," Chen said, recalling a legislator's accusation that he had received a donation from former Chinese president Jiang Zemin (
Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) Vice Chairman Alexander Huang (黃介正) said yesterday that the magazine's report could not be confirmed but said that China's attempts to influence the presidential election had become "more mature and skilled."
But Chen Chung-hsin (
He described China's arrangement of interviews for the media and meetings between the alleged spies and family members as puzzling.
"Perhaps our national security units have obtained more evidence showing the arrests are part of a plot by China to influence our election. But I am not sure about this and I have no access to the information," Chen said.
But he suspected China might be getting up to some mischief.
"We have to be very alert," he said.
With both military threats and aggressive rhetoric failing to coerce the electorate into voting China's favored candidates into office in the 1996 and 2000 presidential elections, China this time hoped to place pressure on Taiwan through the US government, Huang said.
But China's trickery "is not over yet," Huang said, adding that it was difficult to speculate at this moment whether China's strategy to influence the election would be more successful than those used in 1996 and 2000.
It was difficult to predict whether China would keep lashing out in an attempt to turn the presidential campaign in its favor, Huang said.
Huang also said the US had not always acted in the way China had hoped it would concerning Taiwan affairs.
He said the US wanted to maintain a neutral stance on cross-strait matters, saying it would respect the choice of the Taiwanese people in this presidential election.
Su Chi (
The US' impact on this year's presidential election would be much greater than that of China, said Su, adding that the arrests of supposed Taiwanese spies should not be linked to the election campaign.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,