President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), in his role as Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairman, called for party unity in Taoyuan County yesterday as he stepped up campaigning for party candidates ahead of the Feb. 27 legislative by-elections.
“The KMT must be united to win the by-elections. We will face defeat if the party is in any way split,” Ma said while campaigning for Apollo Chen (陳學聖).
Ma praised Chen as a diligent candidate with integrity and discipline, and he — along with other major KMT politicians in the county, such as the county commissioner, the county council speaker and the Jhongli City mayor — called on supporters to vote for Chen to enhance development in Taoyuan.
Ma has spent most of the Lunar New Year holidays touring the nation stumping for candidates in Taoyuan, Hualien, Hsinchu and Chiayi counties.
The KMT lost all three legislative by-elections held last month to the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and has been trying to integrate its local factions ahead of the next elections.
Asked about Taichung Mayor Jason Hu’s (胡志強) comments in a TV interview on Wednesday about his reluctance to become premier, Ma declined to comment except to praise Hu as a great leader.
“Mayor Hu has performed very well over the years. I’ve known him for 40 years and he is a talented, outstanding leader,” Ma said.
In the interview on SETV Hu said he had asked Ma not to appoint him as premier last year after former premier Liu Chao-shiuan (劉兆玄) stepped down.
“I was upset about the rumor that I would take over as the new premier, and I begged the president not to invite me to take the job. I even asked the president whether I should kneel down to beg him,” Hu said in the interview.
Hu said he wasn’t interested in a job in the central government, and that he had told the president not to replace Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) and Vice Premier Eric Chu (朱立倫) before the 2012 presidential election.
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