The Cross-Strait Taiwanese Business People Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Fan Club celebrated its establishment in Taipei yesterday. President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), who was present at the event as KMT chairman, called on Taiwanese businesspeople working in China to support the KMT, which he said is “on the right side of history.”
Top echelons from the party and KMT candidates attended the celebration, organized by Taiwanese working in China to rally votes and encourage businesspeople to return to participate in the Nov. 29 9-in-1 elections.
KMT vice-chairpersons Wu Den-yih (吳敦義), Tseng Yung-chuan (曾永權) and Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱), KMT Central Review Committee Chairmen Lin Join-sane (林中森) and Chiang Pin-kung (江丙坤) — who are respectively the current Straits Exchange Foundation chairman and the former chairman — KMT Taipei mayoral candidate Sean Lien (連勝文) and Taoyuan County Commissioner John Wu (吳志揚) were present at the event alongside business representatives from the nation’s 22 cities and counties.
Photo: CNA
The founding of a KMT fan club among Taiwanese businesspeople working in China for local elections rather than a national election has no precedent.
The reason might have been hinted at by Ma’s speech at the event, in which he said that in some regions: “We are having a close [election] fight.”
“The KMT is on the right side of history and on the side consistent with the needs of the people,” Ma said, highlighting that the party won the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections with the support of Taiwanese businesspeople and that they could again play a key role this year.
Ma reiterated his view that the suspicion that former Mainland Affairs Council deputy minister Chang Hsien-yao’s (張顯耀) leaked state secrets was only “a small ripple in the strong wave of cross-strait developments.”
Ma also championed his efforts in improving cross-strait relations, emphasizing that the student-led Sunflower movement might have hindered the progress of the cross-strait service trade agreement, but did not prevent China’s Taiwan Affairs Office director Zhang Zhijun (張志軍) from visiting Taiwan.
Berating opposition parties for having what he termed “knee-jerk protests” whenever encountering China, Association of Taiwan Investment Enterprises on the Mainland chairman Kuo Shan-hui (郭山輝) said the service pact “must be passed regardless of its flaws,” as the pact is for the overall “uplift and cannot be opposed for a few blemishes or simply for the sake of opposition.”
Kuo said the 138 associations of Taiwanese businesspeople in China would make lists of names to guide the mobilization of potential voters.
The associations are also to help potential voters obtain group discounts for airplane tickets in order to encourage their return for the election, he added.
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
NO-LIMITS PARTNERSHIP: ‘The bottom line’ is that if the US were to have a conflict with China or Russia it would likely open up a second front with the other, a US senator said Beijing and Moscow could cooperate in a conflict over Taiwan, the top US intelligence chief told the US Senate this week. “We see China and Russia, for the first time, exercising together in relation to Taiwan and recognizing that this is a place where China definitely wants Russia to be working with them, and we see no reason why they wouldn’t,” US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told a US Senate Committee on Armed Services hearing on Thursday. US Senator Mike Rounds asked Haines about such a potential scenario. He also asked US Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has