Accompanied by the party’s newly elected and re-elected local government heads, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday thanked voters for their support for the party in the nine-in-one elections on Saturday, vowing to push forward reforms while keeping the nation stable.
Standing under a banner that read: “The force that will keep you carefree,” Tsai, along with the city’s 13 newly elected or re-elected city and county heads and former premier Yu Shyi-kun, bowed in front of the TV cameras to all their supporters, thanking them for their support after the party’s Central Standing Committee meeting at DPP headquarters yesterday afternoon.
“The DPP will strive to make all the people — including those who did not vote for us — believe that the DPP will continue to push forward reforms in a moderate way,” Tsai said at a press conference after the meeting. “The DPP will keep the nation stable and make the people carefree, while doing its best to push Taiwan forward.”
Photo: George Tsorng, Taipei Times
She said that in the nine-in-one elections, the DPP won 13 seats as city and county heads — Keelung City, Taoyuan County, Hsinchu City, Greater Taichung, Changhua County, Yunlin County, Chiayi County, Chiayi City, Greater Tainan, Greater Kaohsiung, Pingtung County, Yilan County and Penghu County — which means that more than 60 percent of the nation’s population now lives in a city or a county with a head affiliated with the DPP.
“This is the best performance in an election that the party has ever had,” Tsai said. “However, we should be encouraged, not contented; we should be grateful, not relaxed; for what comes with people’s expectations is the responsibility to fulfill our promises.”
She said that the DPP understands that people have turned to it because of their dissatisfaction with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and their expectations for change, and therefore the party has to shoulder its responsibility to work closely with society to come up with solutions to the challenges and problems that the nation faces.
Tsai urged all DPP local government heads to work together and share their experiences, and promised that DPP headquarters and the legislative caucus would work with local governments as a team to discuss issues of governance, as well as revision of laws on government budgets and design of local governments.
In addition, Tsai urged all elected DPP officials to learn from the mistakes of the KMT, and be very cautious on disciplinary issues to meet the public’s expectations.
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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