Former premier Simon Chang (張善政), the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) vice presidential candidate, yesterday accused the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) of trying to win elections with smear campaigns and by avoiding a policy debate.
The DPP is “a party of organized rats” who excel at mudslinging and taking advantage of circumstances, Chang told a news conference at KMT headquarters in Taipei.
Citing a poll published yesterday by the Chinese-language United Daily News, Chang said that nearly 50 percent of voters think that the DPP often resorts to mudslinging and online influence campaigns to promote its candidates for the Jan. 11 presidential and legislative elections.
“There has never been so much mudslinging and negative campaigning for a presidential election,” Chang said.
“The reason is simple: The DPP has barely achieved anything worth mentioning in the past three-and-a-half years,” he said.
While he and Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜), the KMT’s presidential candidate, have worked hard to bring public attention to policy discussions and have continued to call for policy debates to be held, the DPP has never seriously responded to their request, Chang said.
Meanwhile, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) said that if the poll is accurate, it would mean that “much of the mudslinging and misinformation against the government has been effective.”
In today’s world, disinformation poses a great challenge to national governance, she said, adding that Han’s campaign and supporters have been proven to be responsible for a great deal of mudslinging and misinformation over the past few months.
Separately, a picture provided by Han’s campaign office on Monday that appeared to suggest that the DPP has launched a smear campaign against him later turned out to have been created by a Han supporter.
The picture, which was clearly photoshopped, shows Han in bed with a woman, both nude.
Han’s campaign office had received information that the DPP was planning to spread false sexual accusations about Han some time this or next week, Han’s spokesman Cheng Chao-hsin (鄭照新) said when releasing the picture.
The supporter, surnamed Huang (黃), later on Monday said that he had made the image to show that the truth can be manipulated.
He did not collaborate with Han’s campaign office to create the picture, Huang wrote on Facebook yesterday.
Han’s campaign office spokeswoman Anne Wang (王淺秋) denied that the campaign team had mistaken the picture as evidence of a DPP smear campaign.
“It was not a mistake,” Wang said, adding that although the picture had been created as a reminder for other supporters, it had been circulated with malicious intent.
If people continue to circulate the picture online with the aim of defaming Han, she would take the case to the police, she said.
Additional reporting by CNA
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods