Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) yesterday said that he is unpredictable and therefore difficult to deal with, when responding to speculation about whether he would run for president next year.
Ko made the remark while attending the groundbreaking ceremony for the Chenggong traditional market (成功市場) reconstruction project in Taipei’s Daan District (大安) yesterday morning.
He had been asked to comment on a news report which quoted a Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) campaign official as saying that the chance of Ko running is diminishing, so the party should not provoke him and rather focus on strategies to beat the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) presidential candidate, Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜).
Photo: Lin Cheng-kung, Taipei Times
“The most difficult part when dealing with Ko Wen-je is that he is too difficult to predict,” the Taipei mayor said. “Never try to predict Ko Wen-je.”
Ko asked who the DPP official quoted in the report was.
Upon hearing that the report did not reveal the official’s identity, he said he often reads news reports quoting people such as “someone close to Ko,” “Ko’s personal aide” or “a city government official,” so he does not take them very seriously.
Asked about poll results suggesting that his approval rating is lower than Han’s, but higher than President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文), and that if he did join the race, one-third of Tsai’s supporters might vote for him, Ko said people should not take poll results too seriously.
Ko said he does not really understand what Han meant at the KMT’s National Congress on Sunday when he said: “The next presidential election will be a battle to decide the life or death of the Republic of China.”
He does not like Han’s suggestion that overseas Taiwanese should write complaint letters to their local government officials about Tsai’s administration, because one should provide clear evidence when trying to accuse others, Ko said.
Asked to comment on the protests in Hong Kong, Ko said: “Mainland China should seriously face the issues in Hong Kong, as it is similar to the situation in Taiwan from 2013 to 2014,” apparently referring to the Sunflower movement.
“I’ve been thinking that only a strong Taiwan can provide resources and protection to Hong Kong, so if Taiwan is too weak, mainland China will not have to succumb when dealing with issues in Hong Kong,” he said.
“The process of democratization in Taiwan over the past 30 years could become an inspiration for China,” he said, adding that when a country’s economic development has reached a certain level, it is hard to maintain a divide between economic development and political development.
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