People First Party (PFP) Chairman and presidential candidate James Soong (宋楚瑜) yesterday held a livestream event on Facebook as he had breakfast with Hon Hai Precision Industry Co founder Terry Gou (郭台銘) in Taipei.
They were joined by Soong’s campaign spokeswoman Belle Yu (于美人), and Yonglin Foundation chief executive officer Amanda Liu (劉宥彤) and deputy chief executive Evelyn Tsai (蔡沁瑜), who are PFP legislator-at-large nominees. The foundation was established by Gou.
The group engaged in a casual discussion ranging from stories about Gou’s career to the televised presidential debate on Sunday.
Photo: Wu Shu-wei, Taipei Times
In response to media queries about whether the livestream aimed to foster discussion, and prevent Soong and the party being “marginalized,” Yu said the campaign does not need such efforts, adding that Gou and Song had been wanting to meet for some time.
With Soong’s political experience, he knows the “pace that caobao (草包, “country bumpkin,” or literally “straw bag”) and caibao (菜包, “vegetable bun”) are going, but he is unwilling to walk at that pace,” she said.
It is not that Soong “does not understand, but that he hears the sound of drums from farther away, so his pace is different from theirs,” she said.
Critics of Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜), the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) presidential candidate, refer to him as caobao, while President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) critics have given her the nickname caibao, a play on her family name, which is a homophone of the Chinese word for “vegetable.”
Asked for her thoughts on the pan-blue and pan-green camps’ perceived disregard of Soong at the debate, Yu said that she believes there is a group of independent voters who want the nation’s leader to possess the kind of perspective Soong provides.
“So let them make the decision,” she said.
TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT: A US Air Force KC-135 tanker came less than 1,000 feet of an EVA plane and was warned off by a Taipei air traffic controller, a report said A US aerial refueling aircraft came very close to an EVA Airways jet in the airspace over southern Taiwan, a military aviation news Web site said. A report published by Alert 5 on Tuesday said that automatic dependent surveillance–broadcast (ADS-B) data captured by planfinder.net on Wednesday last week showed a US Air Force KC-135 tanker “coming less than 1,000 feet [305m] vertically with EVA Air flight BR225 as both aircraft crossed path south of Taiwan” that morning. The report included an audio recording of a female controller from the Taipei air traffic control center telling the unidentified aircraft that it was
A series of discussions on the legacy of martial law and authoritarianism are to be held at the Taipei International Book Exhibition this month, featuring findings and analysis by the Transitional Justice Commission. The commission and publisher Book Republic organized the series, entitled “Escaping the Nation’s Labyrinth of Memory: What Authoritarian Symbols and Records Can Tell Us,” to help people navigate narratives through textual analysis and comparisons with other nations. The four-day series is to begin on Thursday next week with a discussion between commission Chairwoman Yang Tsui (楊翠), Polish-language translator Lin Wei-yun (林蔚昀), and Polish author and artist Pawel Gorecki comparing
MOVING OUT: A former professor said that rent and early education costs in Taipei are the nation’s highest, which makes it difficult for young people to start families The population of Taipei last year fell to the lowest in 23 years due to high rent, more transportation options and the expansion of northern cities into a single metropolis, academics and city officials said on Monday. Data released this month by the Ministry of the Interior showed that the capital was home to 2,602,418 people last year, down 42,623 from 2019. The decline is second only to 1993, when the population fell by 42,828 people, while Taipei’s population was the lowest it has been since 1997. Taipei saw the biggest drop among the six special municipalities, while Taoyuan led the group in
A legislator yesterday called for authorities to investigate the sale of Chinese-made, Internet-connected karaoke machines containing “propaganda songs.” Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Chen Ting-fei (陳亭妃) said she was approached by a person who had discovered Chinese patriotic songs such as My Motherland (我的祖國) — which is commonly referred to as China’s “second national anthem” — in Chinese-made karaoke devices sold in Taiwan. The machines are popular, as they can connect to the Internet, providing access to thousands of songs, she said. One retailer, who asked to remain anonymous, said that the machines first entered the local market about three years ago, starting with
RSS