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.
Considering that most countries issue more than five denominations of banknotes, the central bank has decided to redesign all five denominations, the bank said as it prepares for the first major overhaul of the banknotes in more than 24 years. Central bank Governor Yang Chin-lung (楊金龍) is expected to report to the Legislative Yuan today on the bank’s operations and the redesign’s progress. The bank in a report sent to the legislature ahead of today’s meeting said it had commissioned a survey on the public’s preferences. Survey results showed that NT$100 and NT$1,000 banknotes are the most commonly used, while NT$200 and NT$2,000
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) is suspending retaliation measures against South Korea that were set to take effect tomorrow, after Seoul said it is updating its e-arrival system, MOFA said today. The measures were to be a new round of retaliation after Taiwan on March 1 changed South Korea's designation on government-issued alien resident certificates held by South Korean nationals to "South Korea” from the "Republic of Korea," the country’s official name. The move came after months of protests to Seoul over its listing of Taiwan as "China (Taiwan)" in dropdown menus on its new online immigration entry system. MOFA last week
RSS