Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) yesterday rejected a report in the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper) that he had made plans to form a “white force” alliance.
White force was a term coined by Ko’s campaign team during the 2014 mayoral election in reference to Ko’s role as an independent candidate.
Ko is considering forming an alliance proposed by EasyCard Corp chairman Tai Chi-chuan (戴季全), former adviser to Ko Hung Chi-kune (洪智坤), after the presidential handover on May 20 to boost his chances of re-election amid plummeting approval ratings, the report said.
Photo: Kuo Yi, Taipei Times
Ko initially equivocated when asked about the alliance, saying that the government should learn to accommodate different views from across the political spectrum.
He later said that he had no plans to form any kind of political party in the foreseeable future and asked people not to put too much stock in the rumor.
“I hope that Taipei residents leave me alone for the next two years and allow me to focus on my mayoral work,” he said.
In related news, Taipei Department of Rapid Transportation System (DORTS) Commissioner Chou Lie-liung (周禮良) today became the seventh top official to exit the Taipei City Government.
In a statement, Chou said that he resigned over his “life plans.”
Chou said that when he was recruited, he told Ko that he would only stay for one year, adding that the timing for his resignation was decided after he had made sure that Shilin District’s (士林) Taipei Performing Arts Center, the construction of which is overseen by DORTS, would be completed by the end of this year.
“I have fulfilled my promise to the mayor and my short-term goal,” he said.
Ko said that he had accepted Chou’s resignation.
He said that when he enlisted Chou, he thought that Chou was not serious about leaving after one year, but that if Chou had better plans for his career, he wished Chou well.
Chou, a former deputy minister of Transportation and Communications and DORTS chief engineer, is a tenured official in the field of Mass Rapid Transit system engineering.
Chou has joined a long list of officials to have left the city government since Ko took office 15 months ago, including former Taipei deputy mayor Chou Li-fang (周麗芳), former department of cultural affairs commissioner Ni Chung-hwa (倪重華), former department of research, development and evaluation commissioner Chen Ming-hsun (陳銘薰), former Taipei Department of Sports commissioner Yang Chung-ho (楊忠和), former EasyCard Corp chairman Tai Chi-chuan (戴季全) and former Taipei Rapid Transit Corp president Sun Yi-chun (孫以濬).
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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