A chief executive officer will be appointed for the 2017 Universiade, Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) said yesterday, following challenges in finding a willing deputy mayor candidate.
“While I originally hoped that a deputy mayor could also take on the post of Universiade CEO, I found afterward that Taipei’s government affairs are too complex,” Ko said.
He said that he now believes that responsibility for the event should be shared between a deputy mayor, an event CEO and the commissioner of the city’s Department of Sports Affairs.
The Universiade is an international college student athletic competition organized bi-annually by the International University Sports Federation, which bills it as being second only to the Olympic Games in terms of the events covered and the number of athletes participating.
Ko has made clear his discontent with arrangements for the event under the previous municipal administration, sparking controversy by calling for changes to the athletes’ village and renegotiating the Taipei Dome (台北大巨蛋) project, which is set to hold the event’s opening and closing ceremonies.
Ko’s search for a third deputy mayor has stalled since Ogilvy and Mather Greater China chief executive Shenan Chuang (莊淑芬) turned down the post last month, while event planning was dealt a further setback by the unexpected resignation of Yang Jong-her (楊忠和) as sports commissioner last week after less than a month in office.
In response to questions about a report by the Chinese-language Next Magazine, Ko acknowledged that he had hoped to appoint former Greater Kaohsiung deputy mayor Liu Shih-fang (劉世芳) to the position of event executive, but she is still working for the Kaohsiung Government.
Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu (陳菊) has said that while Liu’s experience might be of help to Taipei, it was “unlikely” that she would be able to take up the post, because she was too important to Kaohsiung.
Ko said he would take up the matter of selecting a CEO again following the appointment of a new sports commissioner next week. Open online applications for the post of sports commissioner closed last night.
Ko also discounted Next Magazine’s report that affairs related to the Universiade continue to be controlled by a “triumvirate” of three officials from the previous administration, saying that two of the officials cited in the report had either resigned or been transferred to other posts.
He added he would leave final decisions about appointments to the commission governing the event to the event CEO after he is appointed.
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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