Members of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) offered no support for President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) emphatic denunciation of the party’s decision on Wednesday to retain Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) as a member and drop its legal case against him.
KMT Chairman and New Taipei City Mayor Eric Chu (朱立倫) yesterday gave a simple reply to the statement — which ran to more than 1,300 words — that Ma issued after Chu said the party would drop its legal case against Wang at the weekly meeting of the party’s Central Standing Committee on Wednesday.
Due process and justice must be taken into account in the case, Chu said when asked to comment on Ma’s statement.
Chu also said it was important that people respect each other’s different perspectives.
When asked whether Ma was informed before the announcement and whether Chu had tried to communicate with the president afterward, he either repeated what he had said or otherwise skirted the questions.
Wang continued to maintain his low-key approach to the case when he was asked to comment on Ma’s reaction yesterday, saying that he would respect whatever decision the party made.
“Let nature takes its course,” Wang said.
Wang remained reticent about contending for the presidency next year or potentially pairing with Chu on the ticket.
Meanwhile, KMT legislators were not reluctant to comment on Ma’s reaction, with many of them urging Ma to refrain from interfering in party affairs.
“I earnestly appealed to President Ma to let go of party affairs and to focus on state affairs. Let Chairman Chu bring together members of the party... He [Ma] should not exacerbate the difficulties the party has been confronting,” KMT Legislator Hsieh Kuo-liang (謝國樑) said.
Ma should realize that the revocation of Wang’s party membership under his guidance has led to major party divisions that must be mended as soon as possible in the face of the merged presidential and legislative elections, KMT Legislator Lin Yu-fang (林郁方) said.
Wang was stripped of his KMT membership in September 2013 amid allegations that he tried to influence a judicial case involving Democratic Progressive Party legislative caucus whip Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘).
The effort was widely portrayed by media outlets as political strife that Ma launched against Wang after questions emerged about alleged illegal wiretapping and the leak of classified investigative information to Ma by former prosecutor-general Huang Shih-ming (黃世銘).
“The Wang case has become a political issue, not a judicial one. Ma should just leave it to public judgement even though he insisted he was right,” Lin said.
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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