During his first appearance yesterday in the Legislative Yuan as the Government Information Office (GIO) director-general, former Cabinet spokesman Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) faced a tough crowd of pan-blue legislators who questioned Lin's qualifications.
During questioning, Peoples First Party Legislator Diane Lee (
PHOTO: WANG MIN-WEI, TAIPEI TIMES
Pan-blue legislators asked whether, as former Cabinet spokesman, Lin would transfer his party's doctrine over to his post as GIO head.
The committee meeting was held to discuss unfreezing parts of the GIO budget relating to national media operations, media relations and official government initiative promotions. Because of last year's controversy surrounding the "embedded marketing policy" supported by former GIO director-general Arthur Iap (葉國興), the Legislative Yuan's Education and Culture committee decided to freeze the GIO budget in those areas.
"Embedded marketing" refers to a policy that integrates government agencies' resources to buy air time and advertisement space to promote government initiatives.
Pan-blue legislators also took the hearing as an opportunity to question the GIO's function, saying that the embedded marketing policy and the amount spent on referendum advertising prior to the election clearly marked the GIO as a vehicle for ruling party propaganda.
Although pan-blue supporters unanimously voted to maintain the budget freeze on all three aspects of the GIO budget, enough pro-green legislators were present to push through the unlocking of the three parts.
When asked about his thoughts on his first report, the ever-smiling Lin said, "It went much more smoothly than I expected."
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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