Former vice premier Wu Rong-i (吳榮義) yesterday announced that he would take part in the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) election for chairperson on May 27, adding that he was confident he could spearhead reforms that would lay the basis for the DPP’s return to power.
Wu, 72, proposed a “second party-founding movement” to revive a spirit of “selflessness” the party enjoyed in its early days and to restore the party’s long-lost values.
“If elected, I would work hard to help the DPP regain people’s trust as a powerful opposition and put the party in a position to regain power,” he told a press conference.
Wu, who currently serves as president of the Taiwan Brain Trust think tank, is the second candidate to announce a bid for the leadership of the party following former Tainan County commissioner Su Huan-chih (蘇煥智).
Other potential candidates include former premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌), who is expected to throw his hat into the ring next week, former DPP chairperson Hsu Hsin-liang (許信良) and former DPP legislator Chai Trong-rong (蔡同榮).
With Su Tseng-chang seen as the strongest candidate, Taiwan independence supporters have been trying to persuade two of three “pro-independence candidates” — which includes Wu, Chai and Su Huan-chih — to withdraw their bids, so pro-independence forces can throw their support behind a single candidate.
However, DPP Legislator Mark Chen (陳唐山), a senior independence movement leader, said negotiations appeared to have failed because Chai and Su Huan-chih have shown no intention of dropping their bids.
Wu yesterday said he was an expert on a wide range of issues that are seen as the DPP’s Achilles heel, such as cross-strait relations, Taiwan-US relations and the economy.
With an economics doctorate from the University of Leuven in Belgium, Wu served as a consultant for the Taiwanese APEC delegation between 1993 and 2004 and has been the president of the Taiwan Stock Exchange.
“More importantly, I would be able to maintain neutrality in dealing with party affairs since I’m not affiliated with any faction,” Wu said, adding that factionalism has been one of the DPP’s most pressing concerns.
Several DPP politicians attended the press conference yesterday in support of Wu’s bid, including former vice president Annette Lu (呂秀蓮), senior independence advocate Koo Kwang-ming (辜寬敏) and a number of DPP and Taiwan Solidarity Union lawmakers.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
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