Taichung Mayor Jason Hu (胡志強) yesterday announced his intention to seek re-election, the first heavyweight from the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) to make known his interest in the year-end special municipality elections after the party approved its nomination mechanism on Wednesday.
The party’s Central Standing Committee agreed to nominate candidates via negotiations to prevent aspirants from engaging in undue competition in primaries or for party votes.
Elections for the heads of five special municipalities will take place in December: Taipei City, Sinbei City (新北市, an upgraded Taipei County), Greater Taichung (a merger of Taichung City and Taichung County), Greater Tainan (a merger of Tainan City and Tainan County) and Greater Kaohsiung (a merger of Kaohsiung City and Kaohsiung County.)
PHOTO: CHANG CHIA-MING, TAIPEI TIMES
With the media reporting that Deputy Taichung County Council Speaker Chang Chuang-hsi (張壯熙) was also interested in joining the race in Taichung, KMT Secretary-General King Pu-tsung (金溥聰) yesterday said he would visit Chang next week.
Hu said he would do his best to win the election if the party nominated him; if not, he would support the candidate chosen by the party.
Hu, who visited King at KMT headquarters in Taipei yesterday afternoon, said he was only interested in Taichung, dismissing speculation that he would run in Kaohsiung.
Hu, who had said he needed to obtain the consent of his wife, said yesterday she was not against his plan to run for re-election.
As for the party’s nominees for the four other areas, King said the KMT’s nomination process would proceed as planned and asked the public to give the party more time because it had just approved the nomination measure on Wednesday.
Earlier yesterday, King said the “situation is clear” in Sinbei City during a morning radio show.
When asked by the host what he meant, King said Taipei County Commissioner Chou Hsi-wei (周錫瑋) had already announced he would not stand in the election and had thrown his backing behind Vice Premier Eric Chu (朱立倫).
“Of course Chu is one of the possible candidates,” he said.
King also cast doubt on recent criticism against President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), saying they were emotional and unfair.
“Some of them said the president doesn’t do anything, and marketing’s the only thing I know,” he said.
King was referring to criticism from political commentator Nan Fang-shuo (南方朔) and three others who have written an open letter to Ma urging him to push reform. Nan Fang-shuo also said Ma was unlikely to be re-elected in 2012 if the KMT lost the municipal elections in December.
Asked whether Ma should follow the model of Chou and drop out of the presidential race if he failed to improve his popularity in the run-up to the 2012 poll, King said it was a hypothetical question and asked the public to give Ma more time to prove his worth.
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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