Education, jobs and transportation are on the agenda for Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) Sinbei City mayoral candidate Eric Chu (朱立倫), who unveiled more of his election platform at a traditional market yesterday.
Chu yesterday focused his campaign on the social front, calling himself an “education-based mayor” that would seek to build more local schools, despite declining enrollment figures.
“In the future, [students] won’t have to study elsewhere. More of our children will be able to learn and happily grow up at local schools,” he said.
The 49-year-old former Taoyuan County commissioner added he would have a comprehensive plan for economic development. While he did not give specific details, he said he was known as a mayor that could successfully lure businesses to set-up shop in the nation’s most populous municipality.
He pledged to create more local jobs and develop Sinbei into an international tourist destination.
ELDERLY CARE
On elderly care, Chu said he believed in the creation of an environment where elderly Sinbei residents wouldn’t have to leave home to receive quality nursing care.
“The elderly need full-hearted [care] and respect; nursing homes can’t completely replace family-based attention,” said Chu, who resigned in May from the vice premier post to run in the Sinbei race.
In previous weeks, Chu had focused more on transit strategy and the construction of future MRT lines, pledging to quadruple the city’s MRT system to 80 stations by 2020.
Touching on the issue again yesterday, he said that like his opponent, Democratic Progressive Party Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), he also believed in the construction of rapid bus lines to complement any future MRT stations.
Over the weekend, Chu was also actively courting Hakka votes and young voters’ support by conducting a dialogue with a younger audience at a book signing for his newly published autobiography and meeting with representatives from Hakka community groups.
TSAI ING-WEN
Tsai, meanwhile, held a series of town hall meetings in Sindian (新店) on Saturday, pledging she would increase park space and create new dedicated bus routes.
She added that if elected, she would consolidate existing transit networks, including the MRT, bus lines and community shuttles, to facilitate development in the soon-to-be special municipality.
The military has spotted two Chinese warships operating in waters near Penghu County in the Taiwan Strait and sent its own naval and air forces to monitor the vessels, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) said. Beijing sends warships and warplanes into the waters and skies around Taiwan on an almost daily basis, drawing condemnation from Taipei. While the ministry offers daily updates on the locations of Chinese military aircraft, it only rarely gives details of where Chinese warships are operating, generally only when it detects aircraft carriers, as happened last week. A Chinese destroyer and a frigate entered waters to the southwest
A magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck off the coast of Yilan County at 8:39pm tonight, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said, with no immediate reports of damage or injuries. The epicenter was 38.7km east-northeast of Yilan County Hall at a focal depth of 98.3km, the CWA’s Seismological Center said. The quake’s maximum intensity, which gauges the actual physical effect of a seismic event, was a level 4 on Taiwan’s 7-tier intensity scale, the center said. That intensity level was recorded in Yilan County’s Nanao Township (南澳), Hsinchu County’s Guansi Township (關西), Nantou County’s Hehuanshan (合歡山) and Hualien County’s Yanliao (鹽寮). An intensity of 3 was
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s comment last year on Tokyo’s potential reaction to a Taiwan-China conflict has forced Beijing to rewrite its invasion plans, a retired Japanese general said. Takaichi told the Diet on Nov. 7 last year that a Chinese naval blockade or military attack on Taiwan could constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan, potentially allowing Tokyo to exercise its right to collective self-defense. Former Japan Ground Self-Defense Force general Kiyofumi Ogawa said in a recent speech that the remark has been interpreted as meaning Japan could intervene in the early stages of a Taiwan Strait conflict, undermining China’s previous assumptions
Instead of focusing solely on the threat of a full-scale military invasion, the US and its allies must prepare for a potential Chinese “quarantine” of Taiwan enforced through customs inspections, Stanford University Hoover fellow Eyck Freymann said in a Foreign Affairs article published on Wednesday. China could use various “gray zone” tactics in “reconfiguring the regional and ultimately the global economic order without a war,” said Freymann, who is also a nonresident research fellow at the US Naval War College. China might seize control of Taiwan’s links to the outside world by requiring all flights and ships entering or leaving Taiwan
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