The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) yesterday said that Hon Hai Precision Industries Co founder Terry Gou (郭台銘) reneged on a promise to support it, a day after the tycoon quit the party.
Gou’s departure came after months of speculation that he might run as an independent in next year’s presidential election after losing the KMT’s presidential primary to Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) in July.
The KMT posted on Facebook a video montage of Gou pledging that he would support the winner of the primary.
Photo courtesy of Gou’s campaign
Gou is shown as having made statements to that effect on April 17, when he received honorary membership of the party, and on May 13, after he emerged from a conference with KMT Chairman Wu Den-yih (吳敦義).
Former Hon Hai “chairman Gou, you said you would do everything in your power to support the candidate elected by the party’s nomination process. Now what?” the post asked.
“The administrator of this account believed that as an honorary party member, you would understand the hard work the chairman [Wu] and the party center put into the primary, but you quit,” it said.
The KMT Culture and Communications Committee said in a statement that Gou has not lived up to the solemn promises he made when he accepted KMT membership in front of portraits of the party’s past leaders, including Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙), Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國).
Gou yesterday posted a video greeting for the Mid-Autumn Festival on Facebook, saying: “Leaving the party lifted a great weight off my shoulders.”
The Central Election Commission yesterday began registration of presidential candidates, with Ou Chung-ching (歐崇敬), a Formosa Alliance member running without the party’s blessing; Non-Partisan Solidarity Union member Chen Yuan-chi (陳源奇); and Master Wu-shan (釋悟善), a Buddhist monk, picking up forms.
Wu-shan said that he gave more than NT$100 million (US$3.22 million) to charitable causes and his platform is to recreate Taiwan’s “economic miracle” by “buying emptiness, moving emptiness and turning all to emptiness.”
Chen, a former representative of the now-defunct National Assembly, ran in the Taipei City Council’s Second District by-election in January and received 89 votes. He is perhaps best known for the 1995 legislative election in Matsu, where he received five votes.
Ou is on the Formosa Alliance’s decisionmaking committee and last week announced his presidential ambitions on YouTube.
Tuesday next week is the final day that the commission accepts applications from independent candidates.
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