Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Vice Chairman Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) in a recent poll took the lead in the race for the KMT chairmanship, which he yesterday said could be attributed to his “positive campaign.”
In a poll conducted by TVBS from Wednesday to Friday last week, Hau was the candidate most favored by the general public and KMT members.
Of members of the general public, 17 percent said they hoped Hau would lead the party, compared with KMT Chairwoman Hung Hsiu-chu’s (洪秀柱) 16 percent and former vice president Wu Den-yih’s (吳敦義) 14 percent.
Photo: Peter Lo, Taipei Times
Among those who identified with the KMT, 24 percent said their pick would be Hau, with Hung at 22 percent and Wu at 19 percent.
Hau also had the greatest support among respondents who said they were KMT members at 20 percent, with Wu trailing at 17 percent and Hung at 13 percent.
Party members believed Hau to be the candidate most capable of reforming the KMT and solving party assets issues, the survey showed.
While visiting retired military personnel camped outside the Legislative Yuan in Taipei, Hau said the results of the poll were due to his “positive campaign.”
Wu questioned the accuracy of the survey, saying that the KMT chairmanship election was internal and the media did not have access to the list of registered party members.
The poll, conducted by the TVBS poll center, gathered 1,026 valid samples, with a 95 percent confidence level and a margin of error of 3.4 percentage points.
Separately yesterday, KMT Central Policy Committee director Alex Tsai (蔡正元) criticized Demos Chiang (蔣友柏), Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) great-grandson.
As the debate over Chiang Kai-shek’s legacy continues to simmer following the government’s announcement that it would rid Taipei’s state-funded Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall of authoritarian symbols and might even change the hall’s name, Tsai blasted remarks made by Demos Chiang during an interview with the BBC’s Chinese-language Web site in 2008.
In the interview, which resurfaced as a result of the recent dispute, Demos Chiang said it is wrong to erect a statue or build a memorial hall for a leader immediately after their death, questioning the KMT’s motives for turning his great-grandfather into a totem and what advantage there would be in comparing him to Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin or Mao Zedong (毛澤東).
“There is nothing for the KMT to gain in making your great-grandfather a totem, as he would be second to Sun Yat-sen (孫中山) in that role,” Tsai said. “Chiang Kai-shek was a KMT member, who the party is obligated to speak up for.”
He called Demos Chiang’s comparison of his great-grandfather to Lenin, Stalin and Mao “a humiliation [for Chiang Kai-shek],” telling him to ask his grandfather, former president Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國), why the statutes were erected, as “they were put up by Chiang Ching-kuo, not the KMT.”
Additional Reporting by Shih Hsiao-kuang
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