Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday showed her respect for Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) by saying that she hopes Wang continues to lead the legislature if the DPP returns to power next year.
“If the DPP regains power, we [the executive branch] will take concrete actions to seek benign interaction with the legislative branch under the leadership of, [I] certainly hope, Speaker Wang,” Tsai said when she met with Wang at his office.
Saying the visit was to learn from Wang in her capacity as DPP presidential candidate, Tsai praised Wang for the role he has played in the process of Taiwan’s democratization.
“Especially at the crucial time for democratization when the DPP first came to power in 2000 … we were lucky to have [Wang] as speaker to keep the legislature running,” said Tsai, who served as a lawmaker for about a year, between December 2004 and January 2006.
During the meeting, Tsai highlighted the inadequacy of the system of checks and balances between the legislature and the executive by mentioning problems that DPP lawmakers have encountered over the past three years in their effort to scrutinize government performance.
“The problem is deeply felt [by the DPP] as we were unable to effectively keep the executive in check because of the government’s lack of transparency in decision-making and policy formulation, and its refusal to provide the opposition party with sufficient information,” she said.
Other than problems with the checks-and-balances system, Tsai added that government leaders were to blame for the legislature’s failure to fully exert its authority.
“Under a unitary government, the legislature was not fully respected,” she said. “There were many bills that were stalled owing to lack of consensus that passed the legislature overnight at the behest of government leaders without being thoroughly debated.”
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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Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching