Technical issues are not an excuse to avoid holding an official debate over policy between the major parties’ presidential candidates, civic groups said yesterday.
Representatives from the Awakening Foundation, Taiwan Association of Human Rights and nine other civic groups held a joint press conference yesterday, at which they shouted slogans calling for the major parties to respect the public and realize democracy by agreeing to stage proper debates.
“So far this election we have seen some personal attacks, but no comprehensive policy debate. Instead, we have had occasional ‘essay’ and ‘speech’ competitions between candidates, where aides write up policy views to post online or candidates offer one-sided, partial glimpses of their policy views at campaign events,” Awakening Foundation head Yang Wan-ying (楊婉瑩) said.
The main parties have failed to outline full policy positions on a wide range of contentious issues, including gender, immigration, employment and human rights, the groups said.
“We are concerned about a lot of policy topics, but there is currently no platform on which candidates have to face voters and formally clarify their positions — what we see instead is them shouting at each other from a distance via the media,” Yang said.
Disagreements over venue choice have held up negotiations between Democratic Progressive Party presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) and Chinese Nationalist Party presidential candidate Eric Chu (朱立倫) over holding a debate.
Tsai has advocated that the debate be hosted by SET-TV cable news, while Chu has called for it to hosted by a consortium of national newspapers along with the Central News Agency and Taiwan Public Television.
Activists dismissed the candidates’ disagreements as “technical.”
“Give us a break — you want to be leaders of the nation. If you are sincerely willing to face the people, is the venue really a problem?” Yang said.
“It is hard to see exactly what the two sides are arguing about because there is no technical barrier to broadcasting the debate simultaneously on different channels. Regardless of whether it is hosted by broadcast or cable television, they can support each other to ensure it reaches everyone,” Taiwan Association of Human Rights executive board member Fort Liao (廖福特) said.
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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