The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) have fielded a record total of five former government spokespersons for January’s legislative elections.
The KMT has named former Government Information Office (GIO) minister Su Jun-pin (蘇俊賓) as a candidate in Greater Tainan City and his successor, Johnny Chiang (江啟臣), as a candidate in Greater Taichung.
The DPP has named Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍), Pasuya Yao (姚文智) and Cheng Wen-tsang (鄭文燦) — who served as head of the GIO or Cabinet spokesmen during the two terms of former president Chen-Shui-bian (陳水扁) — as candidates in Greater Taichung, Taipei and Taoyuan County respectively.
The five all have two things in common — they all have a high level of education and have never held an elected office.
Su said he was riding on the high profile that he earned as a Cabinet spokesman, while Chiang said a former GIO minister is inherently imbued with the advantages of being a government spokesman whose job and remarks were closely followed.
Lin said he was blessed with the benefits of being a former government spokesman and would be a competent candidate with all the publicity resources to which he has access and all the campaigning skills learned in office.
Cheng said there were some drawbacks to being a former government spokesman because election success helps build local connections and without local connections, candidates are like “airborne” troops, who need to make an extra effort to scout the ground before parachuting in.
The GIO will be disbanded next year and its functions will be integrated into other government agencies.
“It’s high time for former GIO heads to enter the election arena, as the GIO will soon be history,” Cheng said.
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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