Former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) helped the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) earn more than NT$200 billion (US$6.08 billion) while serving as chairman, the legislative caucus of the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) said yesterday. Lee Hsien-jen (李先仁), the caucus' office director, said the KMT's recent report on the party's assets had unfairly stated the former chairman had presided over huge losses on the part of party-owned enterprises. The KMT report "purposely ignored" the fact that during Lee's term from 1988 to 2000, when he was also president of the country, huge sums of money had to be spent on the party's daily operations and its nominees for various elections, Lee Hsien-jen said. He estimated that during that time, more than NT$8 billion was required annually to keep the party running. Without mentioning where the funds had come from, the KMT report "intentionally failed" to mention that Lee had helped the party turn a profit of at least NT$200 billion, he added. He criticized KMT Chairman Ma Ying-jeou's (馬英九) plan to use party assets -- now standing at NT$27.7 billion -- to pay for party workers' retirement pensions. "If these assets had been obtained through improper means, how can he make use of them in such a way?" Lee Hsien-jen asked. Sources for the party's finances should be limited to membership dues, government subsidies, political donations and interest, "and all of the other assets should be seen as questionable," he said.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift