Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) officials are hoping that a transforming truck and five vintage vans will help continue the party’s recent string of election wins in the year-end special municipality elections.
“The design of our new campaign truck was influenced by [the movie] Transformers. It is a multipurpose vehicle that will help in our campaigning,” said Andrew Wang (王閔生), director of the DPP’s youth department and one of the design’s staunchest supporters.
The new vehicles are expected to cost as much as NT$5.5 million (US$173,000) and will be financed partly by retiring the party’s fleet of “Kitty Hawk” bicycles — a pun on DPP Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) nickname, Hsiao Ying (小英).
PHOTO: CNA
Twelve of the bicycles will be autographed by senior DPP members and auctioned off during a DPP fundraising event on Saturday in front of Taipei City Hall.
The new campaign truck, also tentatively named the “Kitty Hawk,” will be based on a retrofitted 3.5 tonne vehicle to allow it to unfold into a campaign stage including TVs and speakers.
The truck will also include a coffee stand, where members of the public would be able to talk with DPP politicians “over a quiet cup of coffee,” Wang said.
When the stage is not in use, the truck will double as the party’s operations center during mass rallies and other events, which is expected cut down on the DPP’s fixed costs, Wang said.
Meanwhile hoping to build on the popularity of defeated DPP legislative candidate Hsiao Bi-khim’s (蕭美琴) pink campaign van, the party is planning to buy five more of the vintage vehicles to canvass city streets, though this time the vans will be bright green.
“What we’re doing is trying to convey our party’s ideas and our candidate’s beliefs in a softer manner,” Wang said.
The cash-strapped party hopes that Saturday’s event will help shore up its declining finances.
Items to be auctioned include hats autographed by Tsai and gift bags containing DPP memorabilia.
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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