Chinese authorities are helping the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) encourage Taiwanese businesspeople based in China to return to Taiwan to vote in the Nov. 29 nine-in-one elections through multiple channels, including chapters of China’s Taiwan Affairs Council and local Chinese officials, sources said.
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), who doubles as KMT chairman, has ordered the party to exert as much effort as it did in previous presidential elections to have China-based Taiwanese businesspeople return to vote, the sources added.
Despite recent friction between the Ma administration and Beijing over Ma’s remarks on the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, China has extended its helping hand, they said.
According to people familiar with the KMT, Chinese authorities have been involved in reminding China-based Taiwanese businesspeople about the election to a degree that was seen only in the presidential elections in 2008 and 2012.
That seems somewhat unusual this year, because the elections are for local offices, sources said, adding that the extent of the effort that Chinese authorities have put into the mobilization shows that they regard the election as a precursor to the 2016 presidential election.
Some associations of China-based Taiwanese businesspeople have managed to secure cheaper flights available from between Nov. 20 and Nov. 28, with cheaper returning tickets available within a week after the election day, sources said.
It is estimated that there are more than 1 million Taiwanese living in China. About 210,000 people returned to vote in the 2012 presidential election.
Liya Chu (朱如茵), whose parents are New York-based Taiwanese restaurateurs, has been crowned the champion of US television cooking competition MasterChef Junior, after wowing the judges, including celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, with a feast of fusion cuisine. In the finale of the show’s eighth season, broadcast on Thursday, Chu walked away with US$100,000 after serving a spread of spiced duck breast with scallion pancakes and miso eggplant, followed by coconut pandan panna cotta with a passion fruit coulis and sesame tuille. Chu, who was 10 years old at the time of filming three years ago, faced off against then-11-year-old Grayson Price from
A university student has gained the spotlight for an interactive map he designed detailing all of China’s military bases and installations throughout the Indo-Pacific region. Soochow University music student Joseph Wen (溫約瑟), who calls himself an amateur military enthusiast, said he created the map to “help people better understand the cross-strait situation.” Wen originally posted the map online on June 14 last year, but it gained greater attention after he mentioned it during an appearance on a China Television talk show. On the show, Wen said he had gathered information on the locations from publicly available Web sites, as
GLOBAL STRATEGY: Indo-Pacific alliances need reinforcement to prevent Chinese occupation of Taiwan, which would threaten Japan, Hawaii and Australia, Pompeo said The US should officially recognize Taiwan as a free, independent nation and establish official diplomatic ties, former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo told an event at the Hudson Institute in Washington on Friday. Every US president since Harry Truman has considered Taiwan’s existence to be of utmost importance to US national security, Pompeo said. Taiwan is a principal US partner in technology and economic matters, and if China were to capture Taiwan’s semiconductor supply chain, it would severely hamper the US economy, Pompeo said. Should China occupy Taiwan, it would severely weaken US influence in the Indo-Pacific region and its surrounding areas,
Opening-day ticket sales for a horror exhibition at the Tainan Art Museum were suspended twice on Saturday as the show attracted too many visitors. Titled “Ghosts and Hells: The Underworld in Asian art,” the exhibition runs until Oct. 16. It is the local version of a show that debuted at the Musee du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris. It was planned and curated by Julien Rousseau. The Tainan museum said that within an hour of its doors opening, more than 1,000 people had entered the exhibition. By noon, 3,000 physical and virtual tickets had been sold, while the museum had more than 4,000
RSS