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.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
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