After falling behind in several media polls after the first Taipei mayoral debate on Friday, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei mayoral candidate Sean Lien (連勝文) has called for a second debate with his independent rival, Ko Wen-je (柯文哲). Ko is more reticent about the idea.
As polls conducted by various media organizations showed that the majority of respondents believed Ko performed better in the televised debate, and that questions seen as biased from panelists endorsed by Lien’s campaign drew fire, Lien is seeking a second showdown. Lien has said that the he and Ko were not on the same page during the first debate and described it with a Chinese-language idiom, saying that it was like “a chicken talking to a duck.”
However, Ko was less enthusiastic about the proposal.
“Lien feels that it was like ‘a chicken talking to a duck’ because he has sent a duck to talk to the chicken,” Ko said yesterday in response to reporters’ questions.
During the debate, Taiwan Competitiveness Forum chairman Thomas Peng (彭錦鵬) accused Ko of setting up illegal accounts for the National Taiwan University Hospital, and asked whether he would set up similar accounts if elected. Peng asked Lien to explain why he would “risk his life to run” in the election, after surviving cancer and a gunshot.
Youth Career Development Association Headquarters chairwoman Chiang Mei (江梅), on the other hand, asked Ko if he would support Taiwanese independence if elected, and asked Lien to elaborate his policy proposals to help younger people launch their own businesses.
“A debate between two candidates should proceed on an equal basis. I insisted on having representatives from civic groups ask questions, because I believed that we could both explain to voters our ideas on different public issues concerning city governance by answering the questions,” Ko said yesterday. “Obviously, Lien has missed that opportunity.”
He said that it does not matter to him whether there is a second debate, adding that he has asked his campaign executive director Yao Li-ming (姚立明) to look into it and make the decision.
A poll conducted by TV station TVBS on Saturday showed that 61 percent of respondents believed Ko performed better in the debate, while 23 percent preferred Lien’s showing. In the same poll, 45 percent of the respondents said they would support Ko in the election, while Lien won support from 32 percent.
The TVBS poll also showed that 48 percent of the respondents thought Ko would win the election, while 23 percent believed Lien would win.
A separate poll conducted by the Chinese-language Apple Daily newspaper generated similar results, with 55.68 percent of the respondents supporting Ko and 33.15 percent backing Lien in the race.
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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