Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) launched her campaign in her hometown in Pingtung County yesterday, laying out four main policy initiatives that she said would pave the party’s road back into the presidency next year.
The DPP chairperson revealed her election slogan — “TAIWAN NEXT” — in big yellow letters against a black background that her campaign says is representative of her plan to bring Taiwan “to the next level and the next generation.”
“Let’s make the right choices for the next generation,” Tsai told supporters at a fishing harbor, announcing that she plans to shutter Taiwan’s nuclear industry by 2025, enact judicial reform, spur more localized economic development and create a better social welfare net.
Photo: Huang Chih-yuan, Taipei Times
Tsai plans to spend the next few months in 73 speaking engagements throughout the country as part of her “TAIWAN NEXT” election tour. The tour will double as campaign events for local legislative nominees, who are counting on a tide of support for the presidential candidate to sweep them into power.
Tsai said that a future DPP administration would make bridging Taiwan’s income disparity one of its first priorities. Speaking especially about smaller cities and counties, she said “flawed” government policies had failed to protect rural industries and create badly needed jobs.
If elected president next year, she said she would redistribute national resources to “let the places that need development receive the care and resources they need” and balance the urban-rural divide, vowing to halt continued population loss in more rural areas.
Pingtung County is the site of the nation’s third nuclear power plant, at which Tsai has vowed to gradually wind down operations, leading to a complete closure of the nuclear industry by 2025 in favor of sustainable energy sources like wind and solar energy.
Appearing together with Pingtung County Commissioner Tsao Chi-hung (曹啟鴻), the two signed a “nuclear-free homeland” pledge that has so far formed the crux of Tsai’s campaign. A disaster at the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant would have “unimaginable” consequences, she said.
Tsai also spoke at a later engagement in Greater Kaohsiung. The events in both places, located in pan-green bastions, coincided with President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) national congress in Greater Taichung, which confirmed Ma as the party presidential candidate and Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) as Ma’s running mate.
Taking aim at the Ma administration, Tsai said that since Ma took power in 2008, much of the public has felt “nothing but disappointment” at many of his government’s policies, including the “6-3-3” campaign pledge that later proved unattainable.
“Taiwan’s human rights, democracy and media freedoms have all declined in the past three years,” she said.
On the sovereignty issue, she also said that the government has been too silent on the word “Taiwan.”
“We should be proud to be Taiwanese,” she said. “And after 2012, we will again loudly proclaim to the world that we are Taiwanese and rightfully showcase to the international community Taiwan’s democratic and economic achievements.”
Tsai will use the English words “TAIWAN NEXT” as the DPP election slogan going into the joint -elections next year, a spokesperson confirmed last month. In a statement on Friday, her campaign office said that the motif would be used alongside the Chinese slogan of “Hope Taiwan, Just Society.”
Economically, Tsai has said that a future administration would seek to ensure that all Taiwanese, not just a select few, benefit from a rising GDP. She has also said, without giving numbers, that she plans to make large public investments in education, social security and affordable housing.
Tsai has also promised to make environmental protection one of her main priorities.
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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