Civic group leaders and members yesterday joined students and Sunflower movement activists in launching the nation’s newest political party, which its chief organizer, Tsay Ting-kuei (蔡丁貴), said would be named the Free Taiwan Party (自由台灣黨).
Tsay said the party’s platform is to advocate Taiwanese independence and to establish Taiwan as a sovereign nation, by terminating the rule of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regime, with what Tsay called its “fraudulent Republic of China” (ROC).
“The Free Taiwan Party will consolidate the forces of pro-Taiwan groups to power the engine at the forefront of the Taiwanese liberation and independence movement,” Tsay said at the party’s launch ceremony in Taipei yesterday. “We aim to establish a sovereign nation of Taiwan, which will not be absent from the international community, and to join the UN.”
Tsay, convener for the Alliance of Referendum for Taiwan, said the KMT is a colonial regime from China that exploited the peoples and resources of Taiwan through autocratic rule, while enriching its own circles of business conglomerates.
Therefore, the name of the party espouses the overthrow of the KMT regime, so people can be “free of poverty” and “free from injustice,” as well as “free from invasion” from China, he said.
Tsay outlined the party’s principal goals: to help the pan-green camp defeat the KMT in next year’s election and garner enough votes to have at least three legislators-at-large to enable the formation of a party caucus in the legislature.
“We also aim to have enough popular support by 2020 to mobilize civic organizations to besiege the Presidential Office Building to demand the abolition of the ROC Constitution through a referendum vote,” he added.
Former Taiwan Association of University Professors chairman Cheng Chin-jen (鄭欽仁) was among the academics, civic group members and campaigners who attended.
Cheng said that it has been 70 years since the end of the World War II, but Taiwan remains under colonial rule, unlike many third-world countries that overthrew their colonial overlords to become independent nations.
“It is time for action to end the seven decades of slavery under the KMT. This is also to declare to the US, Japan and other countries our aspiration for real independence, and seek their support for establishing the sovereign nation of Taiwan,” he said.
The Free Taiwan Party has a Formosan black bear as its mascot, and a mock-up character was present at the launch.
Tsay also named the classic pro-independence song Ocean Taiwan (海洋的國家) as the party’s official anthem. The song’s composer, the singer Wang Ming-jer (王明哲), was on hand with his guitar to belt out a rousing rendition, joined by the audience, to wrap up the event.
Also attending the launch to lend support were Restoration of Taiwan Social Justice (台左維新) convener Lin Yu-lun (林于倫), historian Lee Yeng-chyh (李永熾), Formoshock Society (福爾摩鯊社) head Yoshi Liu (劉敬文), political commentator Paul Lin (林保華) and law professor Huang Zong-le (黃宗樂).
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