Former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) spokesperson Yang Wei-chung (楊偉中) yesterday rebuffed KMT chairperson candidate Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱) with historical documents demonstrating that the KMT had been financially aided by the government, rather than the other way around as Hung claimed.
The KMT caucus on Thursday called on the party headquarters to donate the remaining party assets after deducting current and retired party workers’ pensions. KMT chairperson candidates Apollo Chen (陳學聖), Huang Min-hui (黃敏惠) and Hung agreed with the proposal, while Lee Hsin (李新) said the assets should be shared among the party members.
However, Hung also said that the problem of the KMT’s party assets has its “historical background” and should not be treated as a crime, adding that “returning party assets to zero” is a “pseudo-issue.”
She said that the KMT had also contributed a lot to the government, citing the amount of gold and national treasures now housed in the National Palace Museum that the party had brought from China in 1949 and asked the public to rationally examine whether it was the government that had helped the party or the party that had helped the government.
Yang took issue with Hung yesterday, saying on a Facebook post that it is a “fact as hard as iron” that the government had assisted the party rather than the other way around.
He posted two photographs, one of a KMT file and the other of a newspaper clipping, along with the article as evidence to support his statement.
The file, dated 1953, shows that the KMT’s party affairs expenditure was NT$21 million (US$637,329 at current rates), about half of which was covered by “government aid.”
The party returned only NT$1 million and then-KMT chairman Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) said “okay” to this financial management, Yang said.
He said files like this one are abundant and asked the party as a whole to “rationally examine” them and make them public.
“Some might argue that that was only a provisional measure, but we can see [from the news clipping] that 26 years later, in 1979, the KMT was still criticized for ‘footing the bills of its activities with local government budget,’” Yang said.
“The party assets had not only been a product of government assistance, but also of deprivation of people,” Yang said. “Only when the KMT could stare the injustice of the party assets in the face could it relieve itself of the burden and make the right choice on the issues concerning transitional justice.”
Taiwanese can file complaints with the Tourism Administration to report travel agencies if their activities caused termination of a person’s citizenship, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said yesterday, after a podcaster highlighted a case in which a person’s citizenship was canceled for receiving a single-use Chinese passport to enter Russia. The council is aware of incidents in which people who signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of Russia were told they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, Chiu told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Taipei. However, the travel agencies actually applied
Japanese footwear brand Onitsuka Tiger today issued a public apology and said it has suspended an employee amid allegations that the staff member discriminated against a Vietnamese customer at its Taipei 101 store. Posting on the social media platform Threads yesterday, a user said that an employee at the store said that “those shoes are very expensive” when her friend, who is a migrant worker from Vietnam, asked for assistance. The employee then ignored her until she asked again, to which she replied: "We don't have a size 37." The post had amassed nearly 26,000 likes and 916 comments as of this
New measures aimed at making Taiwan more attractive to foreign professionals came into effect this month, the National Development Council said yesterday. Among the changes, international students at Taiwanese universities would be able to work in Taiwan without a work permit in the two years after they graduate, explainer materials provided by the council said. In addition, foreign nationals who graduated from one of the world’s top 200 universities within the past five years can also apply for a two-year open work permit. Previously, those graduates would have needed to apply for a work permit using point-based criteria or have a Taiwanese company
The Shilin District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday indicted two Taiwanese and issued a wanted notice for Pete Liu (劉作虎), founder of Shenzhen-based smartphone manufacturer OnePlus Technology Co (萬普拉斯科技), for allegedly contravening the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例) by poaching 70 engineers in Taiwan. Liu allegedly traveled to Taiwan at the end of 2014 and met with a Taiwanese man surnamed Lin (林) to discuss establishing a mobile software research and development (R&D) team in Taiwan, prosecutors said. Without approval from the government, Lin, following Liu’s instructions, recruited more than 70 software
RSS