The legislature will quickly pass a package of anti-corruption or “sunshine” bills designed to ensure clean politics when its new session begins this week, Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) said yesterday.
Wang said he believed the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) planned to push the bills when the legislative session opens on Friday.
“As long as the KMT proposes the draft bills, the legislature will follow the legislative procedures in reviewing the bills,” Wang said.
“It would not take long to complete the legislation of the bills,” he said.
Critics have blasted the KMT-dominated legislature for failing to pass the sunshine bills in previous sessions.
Wang made the remarks earlier yesterday at the Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport prior to his departure for Japan, where he will give a speech at a symposium on relations between the US, Japan and Taiwan at the invitation of the Okazaki Institute in Tokyo.
During his trip, Wang will meet former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe. Wang is returning to Taiwan today to prepare for the coming legislative session.
Wang visited Japan early last month as part of the government’s efforts to cement ties with Japan simultaneously with its recent moves to improve relations with China.
During the visit last month, Wang met Japanese lawmaker Taro Aso, a former foreign minister who is widely expected to win the race to become Japanese prime minister next Monday.
Wang will not meet Aso during this trip as Aso is busy with the election, senior legislative sources said.
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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