A group of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislative aides yesterday said they would stage a signature campaign starting today in a bid to recall Keelung Mayor Hsu Tsai-li (許財利), who was recently convicted of corruption.
Hsu was found guilty by the Keelung District Court of abusing his position to sell a plot of land to the Keelung City Government's bus department. He was sentenced on Sept. 19 to seven years in prison and deprived of civil rights for eight years.
His KMT membership was canceled after the conviction. KMT Chairman Ma Ying-jeou (
Chiao Chun (焦鈞), the director of KMT Legislator Pai Tien-chih's (白添枝) office, told a press conference yesterday that the group thought KMT headquarters had been slow taking action on Hsu's case.
The group therefore decided to initiate a signature campaign this morning in front of Keelung's train station, which aims to gather the 5,847 signatures needed to pass the threshold -- 2 percent of the city's voters -- required to propose a recall motion to the Central Election Commission based on the Election and Recall Law (
"Keelung citizens have the right to make a decision on whether to choose Hsu [as the mayor] again," said Chang Shi-gang (
He added that the KMT should speed up the pace of its reform so as to "leave a better impression on the pubic and the media."
Asked about his reaction to the group's proposal, Ma said he had urged the party's Keelung branch to prepare a recall motion against Hsu.
He denied Chiao's allegation that KMT headquarters had not actively dealt with Hsu's case, adding that the party was not late in preparing a recall motion as Hsu had just completed his first-year term this Wednesday.
According to the Election and Recall Law, government chiefs cannot be recalled until they have served their first year in office.
The Young Turks, however, said they had reached a resolution before holding the press conference that they would cut communications with party headquarters for the time being.
They are also initiating an online signature campaign at the same time to garner another 38,003 signatures, or 13 percent of the city's voters, as required for a recall vote to be upheld by law.
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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