Improved feng shui brought about by filling in a swimming pool outside its Taipei headquarters helped the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) to achieve its surprise victory in the legislative elections, a KMT lawmaker said yesterday.
The KMT-led pan-blue camp won a total of 114 out of the 225 seats in the Dec. 11 elections despite expectations it would do worse and, according to KMT Legislator Chi Kuo-tung (
"Our momentum for the legislative election was enhanced after the swimming pool was filled. I think it has a psychological impact," he told cable news channel TVBS.
"When people tell you it's bad [feng shui], you'd rather believe it's true," he said.
The election followed the KMT's narrow defeat in the March presidential election, after a mysterious election-eve shooting lightly wounded President Chen Shui-bian (
The pan-green camp, led by Chen's Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), was tipped to make gains in the recent elections to seize control of the legislature for the first time, but ended up with only 101 seats.
But not everyone in the KMT is convinced the party's change of luck in the most recent poll could be ascribed to feng shui, an ancient Chinese belief in channelling good and bad psychic energy through the careful arrangement of furniture and ornaments.
Some feng shui experts had reportedly warned the KMT a large pool of water near its base would make it vulnerable to the DPP, considering the reference to water in the president's first name.
"This is only pure coincidence," KMT Spokeswoman Kuo Su-chun (
Originating from ancient Taoism, feng shui theories remain popular in Taiwan, where there are at least 4 million Taoist followers out of the 23 million residents.
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
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
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