President-elect Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) has reiterated that she will recruit people to form her administrative team based purely on their talent and professional ability, and that her team would transcend party political lines, a Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) spokesman said yesterday.
A report by the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the sister newspaper of the Taipei Times) yesterday said that there are three principles Tsai would enforce when forming her Cabinet.
First, most of the heads of government agencies and administrative officers that she would appoint would be non-DPP members, the report said.
Second, she wants to attract more professionals from the business sector to work for her administration, which is due to take office on May 20, it said.
The third principle is that incumbent Cabinet members would be high on her list for recruitment.
Commenting on the report, DPP spokesperson Wang Min-sheng (王閔生) said in a statement yesterday that Tsai has said she would not decide the new Cabinet lineup until April, adding that she has reiterated that talent would be her top consideration.
There has been wide media speculation that former minister of finance Lin Chuan (林全) is a top choice for premier.
There has also been speculation that Tsai has asked central bank Governor Perng Fai-nan (彭淮南) if he would be willing to serve as premier, with Lin serving as vice premier.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
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,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift