In response to former president Lee Teng-hui’s (李登輝) remark that Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) will be the next Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairman, KMT presidential candidate Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱) yesterday said that such a decision is not Lee’s to make.
At the launch for his new book New Taiwan Position (新台灣主張) on Tuesday, Lee said that Wang is the “representative of the local faction [as opposed to those with Mainlander backgrounds] in the KMT who is most widely respected [within the party], and he should decide what role he plays in staying in the party. If he becomes the KMT’s chairman, which is possible, then the KMT will naturally become the Taiwanese Nationalist Party.”
Lee was responding to recent speculation that the KMT might revise rules stipulating that no one can be renominated as its legislator-at-large twice so that Wang can remain in the legislature.
Photo: Liu Hsin-de, Taipei Times
The former president also said that the KMT cannot be allowed to fall apart, as it and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) could alternate “to build a good government in Taiwan.”
Who serves as the KMT chairman is not a decision for one person to make, let alone Lee, as the party has its own procedures to make that determination, Hung said, adding that KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) is doing a great job.
“There was a rumor about replacing me as presidential candidate; is there going to be another one about Wang replacing Chu as KMT chairman now?” she said.
When asked about the results of a recent poll published by the Chinese-language Apple Daily, which showed that People First Party presidential candidate James Soong (宋楚瑜), with 14.6 percent of support, was trailing Hung’s 28.49 percent, Hung said that she would continue to make strides in her campaign, but added that holding a larger lead over Soong is not her goal, defeating Tsai is.
Hung yesterday also attended an economic and financial forum to propose her solutions to Taiwan’s four major economic predicaments: a failure to upgrade the nation’s manufacturing industry; a failure to adapt the nation’s economic structure to changing times; a failure to understand the meaning and importance of openness; and a failure to take small and medium-sized enterprises seriously.
Hung called for “three leads” — innovation, the younger generation and small and medium-sized enterprises — to drive the economy, adding that openness and fair competition are also vital for a new type of economy.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
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Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching