A Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) caucus whip yesterday urged the opposition parties to be rational and pass major bills in the next legislative session, which is set to open on Feb. 21.
Chen Chin-jun (陳景峻) said the Executive Yuan should continue its administrative work, and expressed hope that the legislature will pass several priority bills that the Executive Yuan submitted but failed to get passed in the previous session.
Chen mentioned in particular the arms procurement project, the confirmation of Control Yuan nominees and a package of amendments to the Organic Law of the Executive Yuan (
He stressed that the opposition-controlled legislature has blocked the arms procurement plan 45 times and the confirmation of Control Yuan nominees 27 times.
On Friday, People First Party (PFP) Chairman James Soong (
Soong said that Premier Su Tseng-chang (
The PFP favors maintaining an adequate national defense capability but is firmly opposed to turning Taiwan into a military base or a partner in any military alliance, he said, adding that maintaining neutrality is the best way for Taiwan to keep its advantages.
The PFP will get to the bottom of these issues and is open to discussions and exchanges of opinion with the KMT and the DPP on related matters, Soong said.
Meanwhile, PFP Legislator Chang Hsien-yao (張顯耀), who is also head of the PFP's policy research center, said that in the new legislative session, the PFP will prioritize a bill jointly put forth by the two parties to amend the Statue Governing the Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (台灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例) to realize direct transport links with China.
Chang said he hopes the pan-green camp of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) will consult "rationally" with the pan-blue camp on the bill and threatened that if they don't, the PFP and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) will initiate a vote to steamroll the bill through the legislature when the four-month consultation period expires in May.
On the controversial cross-strait peace promotion bill, which stipulates that a peace-promotion committee will be set up under the Legislative Yuan, Chang said that as a goodwill gesture to the DPP, the PFP will not object if the DPP wants to make the committee subordinate to the Presidential Office.
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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