The three vice presidential candidates acted as expected in a televised debate on Jan. 1, and completely in line with the characteristics of their positions and backgrounds.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) vice presidential candidate Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) played it safe and made prompt and flexible responses when challenged, judiciously avoiding traps and calmly restating her stance.
Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Legislator and vice presidential candidate Cynthia Wu (吳欣盈) performed better overall than in the previous vice presidential debate, but her contradictory and unfounded statements about the cross-strait service trade agreement proved the TPP’s intention to restart the talks.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) vice presidential candidate Jaw Shaw-kong (趙少康) took center stage at the debate. Jaw, as the KMT’s famous pundit and head of the “blue fighters” faction, continued to play his role as the irresponsible host of political talk shows.
According to the Asia Fact Check Lab, some of Jaw’s claims did not reflect reality. He said that residents in the neighborhood of a nuclear plant are happy to receive radioactive waste and that Taylor Swift turned down the offer to perform in Taiwan due to geopolitical risks.
Jaw made use of one-sided information and not-evidence-based statements to manipulate public opinion. That is a common dirty trick of the KMT: throwing mud at their opponents.
Rumors out of thin air go viral with the help of pan-blue media and social media platforms to influence the target audience’s opinions. Falsehood disseminates widely and finally escalates into more extreme and polarized debate.
The DPP is thus asked to spend time on making clarifications in response to the disinformation prior to tackling more urgent cases. The process is a waste of time and resources, and drags people into endless mudslinging. Such mudslinging is why young people have got sick of politics.
The mud finally turns into the soil in which TPP Chairman and presidential candidate Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) has flourished.
It is not true that the KMT and the DPP are rotten. Considering what Ko has done and said, he never contemplated creating new, clean politics.
Instead, he picks up the pan-blue camp’s propaganda tools, well-packaged and transformed to expand the size of the mudslinging. Ko, being questioned, beats around the bush and even throws mud at others to start a new fight and to divert attention from himself.
With widespread use of the Internet, the blue camp and the white camp have targeted satellite media rather than terrestrial media. The mudslinging used to occur in traditional media, television and broadcasting now extends to the Internet.
That has a profound effect on Taiwan’s future and is a problem that the pan-green camp should seriously consider and confront.
Hong Tsun-ming, originally from Hong Kong, is a specialist in the Taiwan Statebuilding Party’s international section.
Translated by Hsieh Yi-ching
In a stark reminder of China’s persistent territorial overreach, Pema Wangjom Thongdok, a woman from Arunachal Pradesh holding an Indian passport, was detained for 18 hours at Shanghai Pudong Airport on Nov. 24 last year. Chinese immigration officials allegedly informed her that her passport was “invalid” because she was “Chinese,” refusing to recognize her Indian citizenship and claiming Arunachal Pradesh as part of South Tibet. Officials had insisted that Thongdok, an Indian-origin UK resident traveling for a conference, was not Indian despite her valid documents. India lodged a strong diplomatic protest, summoning the Chinese charge d’affaires in Delhi and demanding
In the past 72 hours, US Senators Roger Wicker, Dan Sullivan and Ruben Gallego took to social media to publicly rebuke the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) over the defense budget. I understand that Taiwan’s head is on the chopping block, and the urgency of its security situation cannot be overstated. However, the comments from Wicker, Sullivan and Gallego suggest they have fallen victim to a sophisticated disinformation campaign orchestrated by an administration in Taipei that treats national security as a partisan weapon. The narrative fed to our allies claims the opposition is slashing the defense budget to kowtow to the Chinese
In a Taipei Times editorial published almost three years ago (“Macron goes off-piste,” April 13, 2023, page 8), French President Emmanuel Macron was criticized for comments he made immediately after meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in Beijing. Macron had spoken of the need for his country to find a path on Chinese foreign policy no longer aligned with that of the US, saying that continuing to follow the US agenda would sacrifice the EU’s strategic autonomy. At the time, Macron was criticized for gifting Xi a PR coup, and the editorial said that he had been “persuaded to run
The wrap-up press event on Feb. 1 for the new local period suspense film Murder of the Century (世紀血案), adapted from the true story of the Lin family murders (林家血案) in 1980, has sparked waves of condemnation in the past week, as well as a boycott. The film is based on the shocking, unsolved murders that occurred at then-imprisoned provincial councilor and democracy advocate Lin I-hsiung’s (林義雄) residence on Feb. 28, 1980, while Lin was detained for his participation in the Formosa Incident, in which police and protesters clashed during a pro-democracy rally in Kaohsiung organized by Formosa Magazine on Dec.
RSS