The race for the post of Kaohsiung mayor appears to be getting vicious months before the start of the official campaign -- at least within the KMT.
James Chen (
Suspicions have arisen within the KMT that Lien is willing to sacrifice the party's candidate to placate PFP Chairman James Soong (
Lien and Soong have agreed to jointly nominate a candidate for the Kaohsiung race. Given that PFP Vice Chairman Chang Chao-hsiung (
hsiung deputy mayor, would be a shoo-in. Huang was chosen by the KMT through consensus. The party wasn't even worried about angering Kaohsiung Council Speaker Huang Chi-chuan (
In late June, however, Chang Po-ya announced her candidacy, throwing a monkey wrench into the pan-blue camp's plans. The KMT headquarters kept telling Huang not to give up and he believed what he was hearing, unaware that Lien and Soong had secretly listed Chang as a candidate.
The PFP wants to participate in elections, but it lacks talent and resources. The PFP's strategy for both the Taipei and Kaohsiung mayoral races has been to maintain pan-blue cooperation and use public opinion polls to resolve inter-camp disputes over who is the best candidate. It will support anyone who can block a DPP victory and has some chance of winning. But the PFP has never had confidence in Haung Jun-ying as a candidate. So it was happy to see former DPP chairman Shih Ming-te (
Now that it looks like Lien is dumping Huang in favor of Soong's choice, the KMT leader will have a hard time complaining about how former president Lee Teng-hui (
The KMT now appears willing to take a wait-and-see attitude over the rivalry between Huang and Chang. Such an irresolute attitude shows Lien's
policy-making style as well as the confusion of values within the KMT. To resolve the dispute, the KMT will have to prioritize its objectives -- does it want to win the race or save face, does it want to cultivate talent for the party or pave the way for the 2004 presidential elections? The KMT will have to come up with a clear objective if it wants to ensure party cohesiveness, enhance KMT-PFP cooperation and create the possibility of winning the election.
Shilly-shallying over candidates is hardly the kind of behavior that creates a winning campaign. What it does do is plant the seeds for a defeat.
Donald Trump’s return to the White House has offered Taiwan a paradoxical mix of reassurance and risk. Trump’s visceral hostility toward China could reinforce deterrence in the Taiwan Strait. Yet his disdain for alliances and penchant for transactional bargaining threaten to erode what Taiwan needs most: a reliable US commitment. Taiwan’s security depends less on US power than on US reliability, but Trump is undermining the latter. Deterrence without credibility is a hollow shield. Trump’s China policy in his second term has oscillated wildly between confrontation and conciliation. One day, he threatens Beijing with “massive” tariffs and calls China America’s “greatest geopolitical
US President Donald Trump’s seemingly throwaway “Taiwan is Taiwan” statement has been appearing in headlines all over the media. Although it appears to have been made in passing, the comment nevertheless reveals something about Trump’s views and his understanding of Taiwan’s situation. In line with the Taiwan Relations Act, the US and Taiwan enjoy unofficial, but close economic, cultural and national defense ties. They lack official diplomatic relations, but maintain a partnership based on shared democratic values and strategic alignment. Excluding China, Taiwan maintains a level of diplomatic relations, official or otherwise, with many nations worldwide. It can be said that
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) made the astonishing assertion during an interview with Germany’s Deutsche Welle, published on Friday last week, that Russian President Vladimir Putin is not a dictator. She also essentially absolved Putin of blame for initiating the war in Ukraine. Commentators have since listed the reasons that Cheng’s assertion was not only absurd, but bordered on dangerous. Her claim is certainly absurd to the extent that there is no need to discuss the substance of it: It would be far more useful to assess what drove her to make the point and stick so
The central bank has launched a redesign of the New Taiwan dollar banknotes, prompting questions from Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators — “Are we not promoting digital payments? Why spend NT$5 billion on a redesign?” Many assume that cash will disappear in the digital age, but they forget that it represents the ultimate trust in the system. Banknotes do not become obsolete, they do not crash, they cannot be frozen and they leave no record of transactions. They remain the cleanest means of exchange in a free society. In a fully digitized world, every purchase, donation and action leaves behind data.
RSS