The Sun Yat-sen School, established last year by former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairwoman Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱), yesterday announced that it will nominate candidates for the party’s primary elections for next year’s mayoral and councilor elections to achieve peace and reconcile with Beijing.
The school will field its own mayoral and councilor candidates to seek KMT nomination, focusing on the six special municipalities, principal Chang Ya-chung (張亞中) said during a National Day banquet the foundation organized in Taipei yesterday.
However, he declined to name the candidates.
Photo: Wang Yi-sung, Taipei Times
Chang dismissed the possibility of Hung joining the primary elections, saying only that the school would announce a list of candidates within a few weeks.
Chang rejected a claim that Hung’s faction directed the school’s participation in the primary elections, adding that their participation would allow the KMT to nominate the most eligible candidates to compete with the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).
The school would act independently and raise its own funds, Chang added.
The participation intends to “save Taiwan and the Republic of China [ROC] from Taiwanese independence and cross-strait military conflict,” Chang said.
He criticized the DPP for its pro-independence stance and the KMT for its failure to achieve peaceful reconciliation with Beijing.
Premier William Lai’s (賴清德) “pragmatic independence” is part of the “separatism” the DPP advocates to “remove” Taiwan from China, Chang said.
“The DPP has completed a reverse takeover [of the ROC]. It suppresses the ROC while ostensibly supporting it,” Chang said. “We have to rescue the ROC from being taken over by Taiwanese independence.”
The DPP does not accept the so-called “1992 consensus” and has been trying to remove Chinese history from school curricula, and if it is re-elected in the general elections in 2020, military tension in the Taiwan Strait would escalate, a situation that the school seeks to avoid, he said.
The “1992 consensus” — a term former Mainland Affairs Council chairman Su Chi (蘇起) in 2006 said he made up in 2000 — refers to a tacit understanding between the KMT and the Chinese government that both sides acknowledge there is “one China,” with each side having its own interpretation of what “China” means.
The foundation aims to achieve peace and reconciliation with Beijing and improve identification with China, with the goal of signing a peace treaty or an armistice with Beijing to end decades of military hostility, he said, echoing the “peace platform” proposed by Hung.
The peace platform was a clause added to the KMT charter last year proposing to negotiate a peace treaty with China, but it was revoked on Aug. 20 after Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) took office as KMT chairman.
The school also aims to resuscitate the KMT using the philosophy of ROC founder Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙), Chang said.
“The KMT should return to Sun’s Three Principles of the People, which is the most important factor with which the KMT could garner the support of Taiwanese,” he said.
The KMT has been losing some of its core narratives since former president Lee Teng-hui’s (李登輝) term, and although it was able to fund its election campaigns with party assets, the party is losing that edge as it is being challenged over the party assets issue, Chang said.
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