Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) yesterday said that exchanging votes in the election of KMT Central Committee members is allowable, as long as bribery is not involved.
Wu made the remark before casting his votes in yesterday’s internal party election for 210 Central Committee members among 358 nominated party representatives.
As each of the 2,046 representatives gets to cast 105 votes, it is only natural that some candidates who are friends had formed alliances to vote for each other, Wu said.
Photo: Liao Chen-huei, Taipei Times
For instance, if two groups of 30 and 40 representatives formed an alliance to vote for each other, it would take up 70 of the votes each members is allowed to cast, leaving them with 35 votes for candidates outside the alliance, Wu said.
He drew a parallel between the election and the election of corporate board members, who must hold enough shares to run for a seat.
In response to media queries for comment on reports that the election had been “corrupted,” Wu said he would not call it corrupted, adding that he had not received reports of bribery ahead of the election.
“I ordered that money must not be involved. It it were, it would have tainted the election and that would definitely not have been allowed,” he said.
Central Committee members are eligible to run for the party’s Central Standing Committee as well as attend the annual Central Committee conference.
Some KMT members have advocated for the post to be annulled due to its poor functionality and bribery scandals surrounding “vote exchanging alliances.”
In related news, Wu on Friday said that people calling for the reduction in the number of ancient Chinese passages in Chinese literature textbooks are “completely wrong” and urged the Democratic Progressive Party administration to not make a blunder by giving in to them.
More than 100 authors have issued a joint statement through the Association for Taiwan Literature calling for the number of classical Chinese literature pieces in school curricula to be significantly reduced to give importance to Taiwanese literature.
The government should not tamper with high-school geography and history curricula, he said, adding that such actions would deny the Republic of China’s existence.
He was referring to the Ministry of Education’s curriculum guidelines review committee’s ongoing effort to reduce the weighting assigned to Chinese geography and history after the guidelines sparked massive students-led protests in 2015 over their perceived “China-centric” perspective.
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
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
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