A Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) campaign event at the National United University (NUU) yesterday has been criticized for disturbing students and violating administrative neutrality on campus.
Security personnel took strict measures around the university’s main Erpingshan campus in Miaoli as KMT presidential candidate Eric Chu (朱立倫) and vice presidential candidate Jennifer Wang (王如玄) attended a gathering at the school’s activity center to launch a joint campaign for the party’s two legislative candidates in the city, Chen Chao-ming (陳超明) and Hsu Chih-jung (徐志榮).
The KMT’s Miaoli branch mobilized about 2,000 supporters who arrived at the campus by bus.
A student in the business management department at noon posted an anonymous article on Dcard, the nation’s largest online communication platform for students, lambasting the KMT for bringing a campaign event to the school.
“The campus entrance is jammed with an entire row of buses and KMT public relations personnel. People cannot get in or get out of the parking lot... I understand that you rented the center, but is it necessary to do this on a Monday?” the student wrote.
The student also complained about KMT supporters smoking in non-smoking areas.
A netizen, identified by the pseudonym “azazandy,” shared a message posted by an NUU student on a closed Facebook group that also questioned the correctness of holding a campaign event at the campus on a school day.
The student urged the KMT to give them a clean and a politically neutral campus.
NUU chief secretary Hung Ju-hsi (洪儒熙) said the school would adhere to the principle of administrative neutrality on campus, noting that campaign banners are banned at the school’s two campuses.
“The activity center was rented out [to the KMT] in accordance with regulations. The Democratic Progressive Party also held a flag presentation ceremony ... here in August, but since it was during summer break, the event did not raise concerns about disrupting classes,” Hung said.
Hung acknowledged that the security measures taken because of the event had put students under pressure and that he has received numerous complaints from faculty members about the party’s buses taking up their parking spaces.
The event’s organizer, Lin Hsiang-chuan (林祥川), said that the reason the party chose the school’s activity center over the Miaoli County Stadium was because the latter would have required a much larger crowd — at least 10,000 people — to fill.
“Since there is distance between the activity center and the university’s classroom buildings, and since the event was held indoors, it should not have had any effects on students’ classes,” Lin 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:
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