Newspapers polls over the last few days have shown Lien and Soong ahead of Chen by 17 to 25 percentage points.
China's concealment for months of the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), has hurt Beijing's image here, however, and the DPP is starting to exploit that.
"It has made many Taiwanese people think twice about doing business with an authoritarian government," said DPP Legislator Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴), the director of the party's international affairs section.
Vice President Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) issued a statement on Monday evening offering to let Chen choose a different running mate for his re-election campaign.
Her outspoken criticisms of China, sometimes going beyond those of Chen, had won her the admiration of many within her party but made her controversial with the broader public.
In an interview on Monday, Soong said he still believed that he had a chance at winning the presidency on his own.
He said that he chose an alliance with Lien instead because he thought the country needed a president who could win more than 50 percent of the vote.
The selection of Lien, 66, and Soong, 61, underlines the continued dominance of older politicians over the conservative wing of national politics, despite the ties that these two men bring to the country's authoritarian past.
The most popular politician by far in the country today, polls show, is Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (
But while Ma, at 52, is seven months older than Chen, he is still viewed within the KMT as too young for national leadership.
The KMT has a strong Confucian history of respect for elders, said Shaw Yu-ming (
"Ma will have his day by behaving mildly, politely," Shaw said.
Soong said that he and Lien both had more experience than Ma and could rely on the wide networks of skilled aides that each had gathered over the years.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
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