In response to calls for reform and new leadership from within the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (
Ma yesterday said the KMT hasn't done enough to cultivate members from the younger generations.
"The party should cultivate party members who are 20 years younger than me," Ma urged yesterday.
Ma, also the KMT's vice chairman and the party's No. 1 political star, yesterday responded to calls from a group of young KMT members who demanded that the party give more opportunities to young people and concede its failures in the presidential election immediately.
Ma said he agreed with Taoyuan County Commissioner Chu Li-luan (
More than 20 representatives of a KMT unit known as the "Chunghsing (Rejuvenation) Elite Group" (中興菁英班), established two years ago to revitalize the party's standing among young people, recently called on the party to face up to the mistakes it made in the election campaign, investigate the reasons for its failure and implement immediate reform.
However, Ma yesterday refused to admit the party's defeat, saying that the legal procedures to recount the election ballots and investigate the assassination attempt on the president were still ongoing.
"It is not time to concede defeat yet, as the pan-blue alliance's lawmakers are still working on the case to recount the ballots and are still exploring the truth regarding the shooting," Ma said.
"We have to wait until our efforts have come to some conclusion to concede the election," Ma said.
The KMT's Organization and Development Affairs Committee director Ting Shou-chung (
Ting said the party currently was not in the mood to embrace defeat and every effort has been made to uncover the truth of the "unjust election."
"Those who think the KMT was defeated should leave the party," Ting said.
The spokesperson for the group, Chiu Teh-hung (
"Ting is still using his old ideas to look at the young people in the party. The KMT's failure has a lot to do with people like him," Chiu said.
Chiu said Ting's remarks reflected the party's hackneyed tradition of vilifying those who speak harsh truths.
"They claimed that they were employing `massive human force' to recount the ballot. Frankly, they are just asking people to endorse a failed election result," Chiu said.
In response to the KMT's internal calls for reform, the Democratic Progressive Party yesterday said the core problem of the KMT's reforms lies in its top leadership, which should shoulder the responsibilities for the election failures and face the younger members' call for generational transfer of power.
DPP Deputy Secretary General Lee Ying-yuan (
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:
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
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
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