Former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) yesterday said he welcomed the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government to rule him out of any commutation it might grant next year to mark the Republic of China’s (ROC) 100th anniversary, his son, Chen Chih-chung (陳致中) said.
The former president began serving a 17-and-a-half-year sentence at Taipei Prison on Dec. 2 after being convicted of accepting bribes in connection with a land deal and a personnel appointment.
After visiting his father, Chen Chih-chung, who was elected as a Greater Kaohsiung City councilor late last month, made a public pledge outside of the prison — alongside several other city councilors-elect who are members of a new political group called “One Side, One Country” (一邊一國連線) to uphold the alliance’s goals.
PHOTO: CNA
More than 30 members of the alliance won council seats in last month’s special municipality elections, with nearly one-third becoming councilors in Greater Tainan (resulting from the merger of Tainan City and Tainan County). The group is dedicated to promoting Taiwan’s independence.
Chen Chih-chung said his father found it comforting that the alliance members chose to make a pledge outside the prison and he hoped the group would get bigger.
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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: