The family of Tainan Council Speaker Lee Chuan-chiao (李全教) criticized the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) for suspending Lee’s party rights over the speaker’s alleged involvement in a vote-buying scheme in the Tainan City Council’s speakership election, saying that the party was scapegoating him.
“We will urge him to withdraw from the KMT when he is released from detention,” the family said.
Lee’s nephew Lee Ying-tung (李英桐) described Lee Chuan-chiao as “the KMT’s cross-bearer,” saying that the judiciary’s decision to detain his uncle was politically motivated and aimed at “wiping [him] out.”
KMT spokesman Charles Chen (陳以信) said after a disciplinary committee meeting on Thursday that the KMT decided to suspend Lee Chuan-chiao’s party rights after taking into account public sentiment, and that the party would take further disciplinary actions pending the courts’ verdict.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Huang Wei-cher (黃偉哲) said that the KMT’s punishment was too light, as the KMT expelled media personality Clara Chou (周玉寇) for simply criticizing President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九).
Huang said that KMT Chairperson Eric Chu (朱立倫) is reluctant to impose a punishment befitting Lee Chuan-chiao’s alleged crime, because he does not want to relinquish Lee Chuan-chiao’s political leverage in southern Taiwan and his connections with Chinese authorities, which might facilitate a meeting between Chu and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平).
Huang said the KMT’s decision came as no surprise, because Chu had pledged brotherhood with Lee Chuan-chiao while stumping for him when Chu was running for KMT chairman last month, adding that Chu had criticized the judiciary by saying: “The judiciary should not be tempered by certain individuals’ influence.”
DPP Legislator Chen Chi-mai (陳其邁) said that the KMT was “making a fool of the public,” because the suspension would not substantially affect Lee Chuan-chiao, as he will not participate in the next year’s legislative elections anyway.
Saying that Ma, when serving as KMT chairman, had distanced himself from local factions and would not have hesitated to expel any party member over vote-buying, Chen added that Chu’s decision was election-oriented, making him an “incubator of money politics in local elections.”
However, KMT Legislator Lai Shyh-bao (賴士葆) said that he respects the disciplinary committee’s decision, adding that further disciplinary actions might be taken following a thorough judicial investigation and that any comments now on the committee’s decision could affect the committee’s objectivity.
Chu refused to make any comments on Lee Chuan-chiao’s suspension yesterday.
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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