Veteran political activist Shih Ming-te (施明德) yesterday lashed out at Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), saying that she lacks leadership and calling her the “female version of President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九).”
Speaking to reporters before giving a lecture at National Taiwan University, Shih said that Tsai had failed to clearly define what her commitment to “maintaining the cross-strait ‘status quo’” entails — even during her trip to the US.
“I still cannot see how she has expressed her views in concrete terms,” Shih said. “She spoke in a very safe way — like an academic. Political leaders should clearly establish their views and follow principles when dealing with important issues. She has to make her stance clear.”
“[By voting for Tsai] we would be selecting a female version of Ma, who might be even more ‘standardized’ than Ma,” Shih added.
Shih said that he simply did not trust Tsai, accusing her of having no core values.
“During the Chinese Nationalist Party [KMT] administration when [former president] Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) was in power, she served as an adviser in both the National Security Council and the Mainland Affairs Council [MAC] under [then-premier] Lien Chan (連戰), but when the DPP rose to power in 2000, she immediately jumped into the DPP administration as the MAC minister,” Shih said.
“It is horrifying to think that she would become our commander-in-chief — would she be able to protect us? Defend us? Or pursue the nation’s interests to the last minute of negotiations?” Shih added.
“Many people told me in private that they do not trust Tsai,” he said.
Commenting on the controversy surrounding the KMT presidential primary, Shih said that the party should “play by the rules” it established, and allow Deputy Legislative Speaker Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱) to be officially nominated.
Shih announced last month that he would enter the presidential race as an independent.
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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