Greeted by both supporters and protesters as they arrived at the Central Election Commission (CEC), Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) and her running mate, Chen Chien-jen (陳建仁), yesterday completed their official candidate registration, vowing to lead Taiwan to a better future.
“Tsai Ing-wen, dongsuan (凍蒜). Chen Chien-jen, dongsuan,” a group of enthusiastic supporters said as they waved Tsai’s campaign flags, using the Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) phrase for “get elected” as the car carrying Tsai and Chen arrived outside the CEC building.
Escorted by police and national officials and candidates, the pair walked through the crowd into the building with smiles on their faces to make the official candidate registration.
Photo: Liu Hsin-de, Taipei Times
However, only about 10m away, Tainan residents protested against an underground railroad project and other protesters demonstrated for labor rights.
“Stop ‘lighting up’ large corporations. Respond to workers’ demands,” some chanted, co-otping Tsai’s campaign slogan “light up Taiwan,” while others urged Tsai to promise to hold public hearings on the railroad project.
As Tsai and Chen appeared, the protesters tried to approach to deliver their petition, but were halted by the police, and the two sides briefly clashed.
Photo: Liu Hsin-de, Taipei Times
The Tainan railroad project involves moving railroad tracks underground, which would require forced expropriation of a strip of land to locate temporary tracks while the construction is in progress, affecting more than 400 households.
However, instead of returning the land to the owners after the project is completed, the Tainan City Government, headed by DPP Tainan Mayor William Lai (賴清德), has decided to turn the land used for temporary tracks into a park, triggering protests from the landowners.
Following the candidate registration, Tsai and Chen left in a motorcade escorted by police cars and police motorcycles — a privilege enjoyed by presidential and vice-presidential candidates once they become official candidates following the registration.
Photo: EPA
Prior to the registration, Tsai vowed she would take Taiwan in a new direction.
“It does not take long to go from here to the CEC; it takes only about 10 minutes; it is simple to register as a candidate as well, but my team and I have been preparing for four years to write down ‘Tsai Ing-wen’ and ‘Chen Chien-jen’ on the form,” Tsai said.
Tsai said she and her team have been through the hardships with Taiwanese for the past four years, and have been to every corner of the nation to understand the needs of the public.
“We do not just propose policies, we hope to propose policies that can touch the hearts of the people,” Tsai said, adding that she hopes to make the democracy, diversity and creativity of Taiwan “the new Asian values.”
“More diverse, more democratic, more fair, more free, more prosperous and more united are the characters of an ideal nation in our mind,” Tsai said. “Toward such a nation, toward such ideals, we are departing now; we are departing to become masters of our hopes.”
Answering questions from the media about her decision to put her personal property into trust, Tsai said the move is to demonstrate her aspiration for clean politics, adding that, if elected, all the officials on her government team would do the same.
Asked about a Bloomberg report that the US is to announce new arms sales to Taiwan next month, Tsai said the US makes such decisions based on the Taiwan Relations Act to provide sufficient weapons for self-defense.
“This is helpful not only for Taiwan’s national security, but also for stability in the Asia-Pacific region, and thus mutually beneficial to both Taiwan and the US,” Tsai said.
Tsai said she does not think the decision comes at a sensitive time, and that it is not connected to the upcoming presidential election.
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
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
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