Former vice president Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) yesterday called for solidarity in the lead up to the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairperson election on Saturday as accusations fly of candidates being disloyal to the party.
The KMT held a policy presentation for members in Taipei, New Taipei City, Keelung and Yilan County, with hundreds of supporters bused to the Banciao Stadium in New Taipei City.
Criticism of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government’s policies was rife, with candidates repeating talking points from policy presentations on television over the past two weeks.
Photo: Liu Hsin-de, Taipei Times
KMT Chairwoman Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱), the first of the six candidates to speak, did not stand on the stage, but shunned the podium to speak at the audience’s level.
Her move was copied by the other candidates, apart from former KMT legislator Pan Wei-kang (潘維剛), who asked whether she could be seen from the back rows before walking onto the stage.
Wu also interacted with the audience during his 15-minute talk, responding to accusations by KMT Vice Chairman Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌), who appeared to criticize Wu over a statement on Friday that questioned Hau’s commitment to the party due to his time as Environmental Protection Administration minister in the administration of former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) of the DPP, while Hau Pei-tsun (郝柏村), Hau Lung-bin’s father, was premier under former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝), who is denounced as a “traitor” by some in the KMT.
Wu said he issued the statement because Hau Lung-bin on May 5 said that Wu had “thrived” under Lee’s party leadership.
Wu invited Hau Lung-bin onto the stage to shake hands, calling for solidarity to live up to the “solidarity signature petition,” proposed by Hau and endorsed and signed by all six candidates on Wednesday last week during a televised debate.
Hung was also invited to stand alongside them and they declared their commitment to solidarity, drawing applause from the audience.
Wu has also clarified his stance on other issues in the past few days after he was reported to have said in an interview that those who seek unification with China could realize their dream by moving to Fuzhou or Shanghai without having to drag 23 million Taiwanese with them.
The remarks reportedly exasperated deep-blue KMT members.
Wu on Friday denied the comments, saying he is “not an idiot.”
He said it is a matter of freedom of speech to espouse independence or unification.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater