In a bid to attract more Hakka votes away from the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) visited former Hualien County commissioner Wu Kuo-tung (吳國棟), a leading Hakka politician in his county, on Thursday night, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) sources said yesterday.
This was at least the second visit Chen has made to Wu during the past three months to overcome animosity generated during the Hualien County commissioner by-election last August.
During the campaign, Chen said Wu was "guilty of being involved with financial scandals," an accusation Wu angrily denied.
Wu, a former member of the KMT, ran an independent campaign after criticizing the party's nomination process as "not transparent and unfair."
Wu finished third in the by-election, well behind the KMT's Hsieh Shen-shan (
According to Council for Hakka Affairs Chairwoman Yeh Chu-lan (葉菊蘭), who has also visited Wu several times since last September, Wu's 93-year-old mother was encouraging her son to support Chen in the presidential election.
The first meeting between Chen and Wu was in December at Wu's residence, and the president even sang a traditional Hakka song for Wu's mother, Yeh said. Wu subsequently turned down the KMT-People First Party's (PFP) offer to head the alliance's presidential campaign headquarters in Hualien County.
Political analysts say young voters, especially the 1.6 million who will have the right to vote for the first time, as well as Hakka people are the key to the final phase of the presidential campaign.
"Hakka voters, who were pro-pan-blue camp during past elections, are now moving to the DPP, while the young voters, who usually support the DPP, seem to be attracted by Lien Chan's (
Taiwanese can file complaints with the Tourism Administration to report travel agencies if their activities caused termination of a person’s citizenship, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said yesterday, after a podcaster highlighted a case in which a person’s citizenship was canceled for receiving a single-use Chinese passport to enter Russia. The council is aware of incidents in which people who signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of Russia were told they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, Chiu told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Taipei. However, the travel agencies actually applied
Japanese footwear brand Onitsuka Tiger today issued a public apology and said it has suspended an employee amid allegations that the staff member discriminated against a Vietnamese customer at its Taipei 101 store. Posting on the social media platform Threads yesterday, a user said that an employee at the store said that “those shoes are very expensive” when her friend, who is a migrant worker from Vietnam, asked for assistance. The employee then ignored her until she asked again, to which she replied: "We don't have a size 37." The post had amassed nearly 26,000 likes and 916 comments as of this
New measures aimed at making Taiwan more attractive to foreign professionals came into effect this month, the National Development Council said yesterday. Among the changes, international students at Taiwanese universities would be able to work in Taiwan without a work permit in the two years after they graduate, explainer materials provided by the council said. In addition, foreign nationals who graduated from one of the world’s top 200 universities within the past five years can also apply for a two-year open work permit. Previously, those graduates would have needed to apply for a work permit using point-based criteria or have a Taiwanese company
US President Donald Trump said "it’s up to" Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) what China does on Taiwan, but that he would be "very unhappy" with a change in the "status quo," the New York Times said in an interview published yesterday. Xi "considers it to be a part of China, and that’s up to him what he’s going to be doing," Trump told the newspaper on Wednesday. "But I’ve expressed to him that I would be very unhappy if he did that, and I don’t think he’ll do that," he added. "I hope he doesn’t do that." Trump made the comments in
RSS