President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), a former Taipei mayor, yesterday joined Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) in inspecting the Tamsui River, praising his successor for improving the quality of the river and using the occasion to campaign for him.
Visiting the river’s Dun Huang Pier, Ma, Hau and Taipei County Commissioner Chou Hsi-wei (周錫瑋) lauded the result of the close cooperation between Taipei city and county on dredging the river, with Hau promising to continue the work if re-elected.
Cleaning up the river was one of Hau’s major campaign promises when he ran for mayor in 2006. Now seeking re-election, Hau has proposed working with the party’s Sinbei mayoral candidate, Eric Chu (朱立倫), to invest NT$50 billion (US$1.5 billion) and set up a Tamsui River management department.
Photo: CNA
The cleanup of the river began when Ma was Taipei mayor. The city government dredged the river and set up a sewage system to improve the water quality.
“I expect Hau to continue the work and make the river better and cleaner,” Ma said.
As Hau has taken leave to focus on the election campaign from yesterday, his participation in a municipal forum raised questions whether he used his status as a mayor for campaign purposes.
Brushing aside the concerns, Hau said: “There are some events that require the mayor’s attendance.”
“We do everything to follow the regulations, and I will make sure that we do not use municipal resources for campaigning,” he added.
Hau’s camp yesterday also ran an ad in the Chinese-language Apple Daily accusing the Democratic Progressive Party Taipei mayoral candidate, Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌), of boycotting subsidies to Taipei City when he served as premier.
Hau said that soon after his election in 2006, he applied with the Executive Yuan to get subsidies for major events and municipal projects, including the Deaflympics, the Taipei International Flora Expo and the renovation of Taipei Songshan Airport.
Su, however, failed to give enough subsidies to the city, Hau said. Rejecting the accusations, Su called the ad a “smear campaign” by the Hau camp.
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