With only 35 days to go before the elections, campaign rallies were held nationwide yesterday as politicians from all political parties staged an all-out effort to solicit votes.
The DPP administration brought out its campaign heavyweights at a rally in Taipei, while former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) appeared in Taipei County to stump for a TSU candidate. Li Shen (李慎), mother of President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), was also made a campaign super stumper in her hometown of Tainan to court votes for the DPP.
PHOTO: CHIANG YING-YING, TAIPEI TIMES
At the DPP rally in Taipei City yesterday, Chen called on all people to unite, and reiterated his ideal of universal service to all Taiwanese people.
"Let's unite and not split over support of A-Bian," Chen said.
Commenting on the dispute between the DPP and the opposition camp over who has the power to name the Cabinet, Chen said that it is reasonable that such power resides with president and the ruling party rather than the majority party in the legislature.
"After the election, the power of appointing the Cabinet will still belong to the president. Under this principle, we support the idea of naming capable and competent people as members of the Cabinet without considering their party background," Chen said. "Under the KMT's rule in the past five decades, the KMT had never recruited a single DPP Cabinet member."
Gaining attention at the rally was the appearance of Minister of Economic Affairs Lin Hsin-yi (
Lin, a Taiwanese representative at the just-concluded APEC meeting in Shanghai, told the rally that Taiwanese could see the barbaric and arrogant behavior of China from broadcasts on TV. Lin then called upon citizens to unite in their support of Taiwan.
Also campaigning yesterday, former president Lee continued to advocate his idea of streamlining the legislature, saying cutting the current 225 seats in half would save about NT$25 billion for public construction.
In Tainan, the president's hometown, Chen's mother stumped for two DPP candidates, Lee Chun-yee (
Li expressed her gratitude for the town's support of her son and appealed to the public to continue to support the party by sending DPP candidates to the legislature.
On the pan-blue camp side, KMT Chairman Lien Chan (
Both Lien and Ma blamed Chen for what they said was his inability to tackle the country's economic woes. Ma demanded Chen yield the power of appointing the Cabinet to the KMT should the former ruling party win the majority of seats in the year-end election.
In response to Chen's allegation that the KMT failed to hand over legal files and documents in the process of transferring power, Lien said Chen is "shivering because he lacks experience and competence."
Chen recently revealed in a soon-to-be-published book that the KMT did not hand over vital papers and records about its operations while in power.
Lien also criticized Chen, saying that he was only good at blaming the nation's economic problems on the opposition parties. "He [Chen] has nothing but a chattering mouth," Lien said.
Yesterday morning, Ma said people have lost patience in waiting for things to improve and that Chen should hand over Cabinet-naming powers to the KMT.
Ma said that, with numerous competent and capable people in the KMT, only the KMT, together with other parties in the pan-blue camp, can lead the country to overcome Taiwan's difficulties.
People First Party Chairman James Soong (
In the morning rally, Soong said Chen has a selective memory on political affairs. First, Soong said, Chen "forgot" what happened during his personal meeting with him, but then remembered that former president Lee Teng-hui (
In the evening, Soong told the rally that he lost the presidential election last year because of cheating by vote-counting authorities.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest foundry service provider, yesterday said that global semiconductor revenue is projected to hit US$1.5 trillion in 2030, after the figure exceeds US$1 trillion this year, as artificial intelligence (AI) demand boosts consumption of token and compute power. “We are still at the beginning of the AI revolution, but we already see a significant impact across the whole semiconductor ecosystem,” TSMC deputy cochief operating officer Kevin Zhang (張曉強) said at the company’s annual technology symposium in Hsinchu City. “It is fair to say that in the past decade, smartphones and other mobile devices were
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS