Despite failing to secure any legislative seats in the Saturday’s election, the Green Party Taiwan (GPT) saw a substantial surge in support, garnering 229,566 party votes, almost four times the number of votes it received in 2008 (58,473)
Although the GPT did not pass the 5 percent threshold needed to allow it to send a legislator-at-large to the legislature, the party, known for its focus on environmental protection and social justice, received 1.74 percent of the total party vote, the fifth-most votes among the 11 parties.
GPT spokesperson Pan Han-shen (潘翰聲) posted an article on his blog after the election, saying: “Our opponent is not a person, but a system. We have to accept the outcome of the election and continue to move toward the critical point of change.”
“The people are eager for clean air, clean water and clean food. These are rights that we have to stand up for,” he said.
Pan, who failed in his bid as a legislative candidate in Taipei, said he would continue to campaign for an energy tax, increases to the amount of green space and for a nuclear-free homeland, which he added was the most wide-ranging and urgent issue.
Notably, the GPT garnered about 35.76 percent of the party vote in Lanyu Township (蘭嶼), where the suspected leakage of radioactive material from a nuclear waste dump is a hot--button issue and led the Tao Aborigines on the island to hold a protest last month.
Sinan Mavivo, a member of the Tao tribe and a legislator-at-large candidate for the GPT, said: “I think this is probably the closest the Tao people have been to the Legislative Yuan in the history of Taiwanese elections.”
“I’ve held the idea that ‘I want to bring the anti-nuclear voices from Lanyu to the legislature’ from the beginning,” she said. “I believe the anti-nuclear voices from Lanyu will not disappear from Taiwan after the election and this is my mission for the land.”
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