Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) should apologize for sabotaging Taiwan's democracy, while his party should be held fully responsible for the nation's inability to become a normal country, pan-green academics said at two separate events yesterday.
During a launch event for the book An Inside Look at Ma Ying-jeou the Taiwan Association of University Professors (TAUP) said that Ma would undoubtedly hand Taiwan to China on a silver platter if elected president.
"The book contains historical documents proving that Ma has consistently sold out Taiwan and that his China-centric policy will destroy Taiwan's hard-earned democracy if he is elected," said the book's compiler, Chen Yi-sheng (陳儀深), a research fellow at Academia Sinica.
Political commentator Ruan Ming (阮銘), who also contributed to the book, called Ma a puppet used by the KMT and the Chinese Communist Party to take back Taiwan. Those who love Ma should save him from being used as a scapegoat by voting for Democratic Progressive party presidential candidate Frank Hsieh (謝長廷), he said.
Ma spokesman Luo chih-chiang (羅智強) shrugged off the criticism, saying that in a democratic society it was normal for a candidate to be slammed by his opponents. Luo added that his camp would not rule out pursuing "further action" if the book is found to contain erroneous information.
Meanwhile, another book, Formosa Betrayed, written by a former US political attache to Taiwan, George Kerr, was also touted by another group of pan-green supporters at a forum yesterday as one of the most accurate books detailing the KMT's past transgressions against Taiwanese.
Chen Rong-cheng (陳榮成), who translated Kerr's book into Chinese, said the KMT should be blamed for the nation's political troubles, adding that the party is a "violent crime ring" in disguise.
"The KMT is worse than the Nazi party," he said, adding that all Taiwanese should read this book to learn the truth about the country's past.
Written in 1964, the book was banned in Taiwan until 1991. An academic said the book contains a detailed account of the KMT government's slaughter of thousands during the 228 Incident.
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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