On Monday last week, Hsinchu Mayor Ann Kao (高虹安) left Taiwan for Japan, while Hsinchu Deputy Mayor Tsai Li-ching (蔡麗清) was suddenly “asked to resign.”
Given that deputy mayors are supposed to handle municipal affairs when mayors are outside of the country, this has caused a stir.
A city government functions with a mayor and deputy mayors, so that the absence of the mayor does not cause disruptions. What is confusing in the case of the Hsinchu City Government is that Kao, while she was away, announced that the deputy mayor would be changed.
This might have caused Tsai — who departed a few days later — to lose interest in her government work and would have made it impossible for her to supervise employees as an “about to resign” deputy mayor.
With Kao away, the city government would have been in a state of limbo.
Kao’s handling of personnel affairs is extremely irresponsible. She simply did what she wanted, despite the disruption to the functioning of the city government.
Some suspect that the announcement of Tsai’s resignation had something to do with the Hsinchu Baseball Stadium case, which has upset Kao.
Another reason might be that Tsai had to resign so that Kao could get out of a corruption lawsuit she faces.
Tsai was recruited by Kao only a few months ago, but the deputy mayor had not made any major mistakes. Even though Tsai has not made a great contribution as deputy mayor, she has worked for the city for some time.
She was asked to leave without even the consolation of being allowed to resign of her own volition — a move that can only be described as ruthless.
However, Kao’s actions are not surprising. After all, she reportedly deducted expenses from her assistants’ payrolls and asked them to put their overtime pay into a “providence fund.”
Her mean attitude toward her assistants is exactly the way she treated her deputy mayor, demonstrating what kind of person she is.
Huang Wei-ping works in public service.
Translated by Emma Liu
On March 22, 2023, at the close of their meeting in Moscow, media microphones were allowed to record Chinese Communist Party (CCP) dictator Xi Jinping (習近平) telling Russia’s dictator Vladimir Putin, “Right now there are changes — the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years — and we are the ones driving these changes together.” Widely read as Xi’s oath to create a China-Russia-dominated world order, it can be considered a high point for the China-Russia-Iran-North Korea (CRINK) informal alliance, which also included the dictatorships of Venezuela and Cuba. China enables and assists Russia’s war against Ukraine and North Korea’s
After thousands of Taiwanese fans poured into the Tokyo Dome to cheer for Taiwan’s national team in the World Baseball Classic’s (WBC) Pool C games, an image of food and drink waste left at the stadium said to have been left by Taiwanese fans began spreading on social media. The image sparked wide debate, only later to be revealed as an artificially generated image. The image caption claimed that “Taiwanese left trash everywhere after watching the game in Tokyo Dome,” and said that one of the “three bad habits” of Taiwanese is littering. However, a reporter from a Japanese media outlet
Taiwanese pragmatism has long been praised when it comes to addressing Chinese attempts to erase Taiwan from the international stage. “Taipei” and the even more inaccurate and degrading “Chinese Taipei,” imposed titles required to participate in international events, are loathed by Taiwanese. That is why there was huge applause in Taiwan when Japanese public broadcaster NHK referred to the Taiwanese Olympic team as “Taiwan,” instead of “Chinese Taipei” during the opening ceremony of the Tokyo Olympics. What is standard protocol for most nations — calling a national team by the name their country is commonly known by — is impossible for
India is not China, and many of its residents fear it never will be. It is hard to imagine a future in which the subcontinent’s manufacturing dominates the world, its foreign investment shapes nations’ destinies, and the challenge of its economic system forces the West to reshape its own policies and principles. However, that is, apparently, what the US administration fears. Speaking in New Delhi last week, US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau warned that “we will not make the same mistakes with India that we did with China 20 years ago.” Although he claimed the recently agreed framework
RSS