President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) was apparently drunk and made a number of gaffes at a banquet after his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in Singapore on Saturday last week, TV footage showed.
“Ah, a Jiangxi man. Our family lived in Jiangxi for 1,100 years” (哎呀，江西的，我們家在江西住過一千一百年), Ma said to a Chinese well-wisher surnamed Hsiung (熊) from China’s Jiangxi Province, a clip aired on Tuesday by a political talk show on SET-TV showed.
When asked for comment on Tuesday, Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平), who has a reputation for having a high tolerance to alcohol, said that Ma knows how to hold his liquor, adding: “I am a little bit behind [in keeping up with] him.”
An unnamed KMT source said that what Ma meant by “our family” was “the Ma clan,” which the president has given “very detailed” accounts of in the past.
The source said the Ma clan 2,000 years ago lived in an area that is now part of Fufeng County in China’s Shaanxi Province, later migrating to the Jiangxi area during the Uprising of the Five Barbarians period (304-316). Following 1,100 years in Jiangxi, the clan first moved to what is now Hunan Province and, 900 years later, migrated to Taiwan, the source said, adding that Ma’s “1,100 years” comment was therefore correct.
Saturday’s incident was not the first time Ma’s sobriety has been called into question.
After attending a banquet hosted by former vice president Lien Chan (連戰) on March 14, 2007, Ma, then mayor of Taipei, was asked by reporters whether he had overindulged, to which he squeakily replied: “Not really.”
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