Former vice president Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) and a former Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislator visited former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) in prison yesterday to discuss Lu’s bid for the presidency and a possible pardon for Chen if the DPP won next year’s elections.
During the morning visit, Lu and Chen exchanged opinions on Lu’s candidacy for the DPP ticket, which Chen encouraged, but reportedly stopped short of endorsing.
Asked whether Chen, who still maintains a significant support base in the DPP, supported her bid, Lu said: “Of course.”
However, she said she could not give any further details of the talks.
“It would have been unusual not to hold the talks, but now that we have, I cannot say what [it was about],” said Lu, who ran with Chen in 2000 and 2004.
Visiting after the former vice president, former DPP legislator Tsai Chi-fang (蔡啟芳) was more forthcoming in what he told Chen, who is serving a 17-and-a-half-year sentence for accepting bribes.
Reports said Tsai told the former president that he needed to “hold on a bit longer,” adding that a release was forthcoming, referring to a potential pardon by a future DPP administration if it won next year’s presidential election.
“It won’t be so long now,” Tsai said. “The DPP has the confidence to pull off a big victory.”
Although the DPP has been noncommittal on the controversial issue of a presidential pardon for Chen, DPP Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) has asked President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) to consider the move.
The former president, whose legacy is still dividing the party he once led, and his wife, Wu Shu-jen (吳淑珍), were found guilty by the Supreme Court in November.
The court upheld a conviction that they took NT$300 million (US$10.23 million) to illegally facilitate a land purchase deal and accepted a NT$10 million bribe to help a prominent businesswoman secure an appointment at a securities firm.
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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