Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) presidential candidate Eric Chu (朱立倫) yesterday said that he regretted vice-presidential candidate Jennifer Wang’s (王如玄) handling of the controversy over her real-estate investments, although he did not regret choosing her as his running mate.
Chu said in an interview that he regretted that it took Wang too long to explain her investments in housing units for military dependents and that she did not understand that the public was looking at the issue based on ethical standards for a vice presidential candidate rather than from a legal perspective.
After the controversy erupted, Wang said that she could not produce the necessary information, because the investments were made a long time ago, and insisted on calculating the purchase and sale prices of each unit in detail, Chu said.
Photo: Liao Chen-huei, Taipei Times
After Wang calculated that she had generated a total of NT$13.8 million (US$418,625) in profit from the military housing unit transactions, she announced her decision to donate the gains.
“I feel it is unfortunate that the decision took so long,” Chu said.
As a human rights lawyer and women’s rights activist, Wang has not only won the recognition of the KMT, but also of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which had recruited her as an adviser when it was in power, Chu said.
Wang’s greatest contribution during her time in office as the head of the Council of Labor Affairs was her efforts to promote labor pensions, but that contribution has not been recognized by the public, he said.
Instead, Wang was deeply hurt by attacks launched by the DPP over the past few weeks, he said.
Wang did not initially think her investments constituted a problem, because she had publicly declared and disclosed all of them, but she did not understand that the public was scrutinizing her as a vice presidential candidate, he said.
“As the moral standards held by the public become increasingly higher, things that happened 10 years ago and even 20 years ago before a person entered politics are subject to scrutiny,” he said.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods