New Taipei City Mayor Eric Chu (朱立倫) yesterday dismissed speculation that he is aiming for the Taipei mayorship in next year’s municipal elections after a poll put him ahead of Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲).
A survey conducted by the Want China Times Group on Tuesday and Wednesday showed Chu of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) leading with a support rating of 27 percent if he were to run against Ko, an independent, and Tainan Mayor William Lai (賴清德) of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) for Taipei mayor.
Ko and Lai had support ratings of 26.2 percent and 15.2 percent respectively.
Photo: Chang An-chiao, Taipei Times
However, assuming Lai does not join the race, Ko’s support rating climbed to 38.7 percent, against Chu’s 32.2 percent.
“I am the mayor of New Taipei City and I will dedicate every day of my life to the affairs of my city, free from any interference,” Chu said when asked to comment on the survey.
Chu said Ko is the mayor of Taipei, with whom he has been working together to make the Greater Taipei area a better place.
In a similar poll published on April 10 by the Chinese-language online news outlet My-Formosa.com, Chu received a support rating of 44.4 percent and trailed behind Ko by only 0.2 percentage points.
Ko and Chu were among the six potential candidates listed by the Formosa survey for respondents to choose from. The others were Lai, who received 40.4 percent, former premier Simon Chang (張善政) with 26.3 percent, DPP Legislator Pasuya Yao (姚文智) with 23.2 percent and KMT Legislator Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) with 19.6 percent.
Asked the same question at a separate event in Taipei yesterday, Ko said: “You will get the same answer even if you [reporters] ask me 100 times: We should focus on our jobs today and talk about it later.”
However, KMT Culture and Communications Committee deputy director-general Lee Ming-hsien (李明賢) said at a political talk show that a previous survey conducted by the KMT suggested that there were two politicians who could beat Ko, and they were not Chu.
“Chu has yet to reveal his intention because after all, running for Taipei mayor would mean he has to resign as New Taipei City mayor and that would be breaking his promise to the city’s residents,” Lee 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:
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