Rain failed to dampen the enthusiasm of the ebullient crowd that gathered in front of the campaign headquarters of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) last night. Ma's supporters went wild as the election results trickled in and it became increasingly clear that their candidate was not just going to win, but would land a resounding victory.
Vendors selling election paraphernalia such as plastic dolls of Ma and airhorns did a roaring trade while dodging police along Taipei's Zhonghua Road, where the headquarters of the Ma campaign is located.
It was hard to mistake 49-year-old Hsu Hsih-min (
By 5pm Ma was already leading by half a million votes.
The excited crowd, sensing that Ma was going to beat expectations by a large margin, started chanting "2 million, 2 million" at 5:30pm.
When Ma's lead increased to more than 2 million votes, the blast of noise issued collectively by the crowd, mostly from airhorns, was deafening.
The crowd soon filled the fenced-off section in front of the campaign headquarters where a parade of KMT politicians pumped up the crowd from a stage.
People overflowed out along Zhonghua Road and filled up the traffic islands at the intersection with Aiguo West Road.
Even Ma's die-hard supporters were surprised by the magnitude of the victory.
"I bleed blue," said Cheng Chang-jiang (程長江), a 43-year-old Taipei resident who was not only sporting Ma paraphernalia from head to toe but also held a large homemade sign to show his support.
Cheng didn't just think Ma would win, he put money on it.
"I made a NT$10,000 bet with my friend that Ma would win by at least 800,000 votes," Cheng said. "But I had no idea that he would win by this much."
"I wish I had made more bets," Cheng said, grinning from ear to ear.
While most voters who turned up at Ma's headquarters last night were Taipei City and Taipei County residents, Lee Wea-hua (
"Voting is my patriotic duty," said Lee, who returns to Taiwan with his wife for every presidential election.
"We love our country and we always vote blue," Lee said.
Most members of the crowd were long-time KMT supporters like Lee and Cheng.
However, 53-year-old Chen Mei-tien said that she voted for the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in 2000.
"I voted for the DPP with high hopes back in 2000," Chen said. "But they didn't deliver and the time has come for power to change hands again. That's democracy."
GREAT POWER COMPETITION: Beijing views its military cooperation with Russia as a means to push back against the joint power of the US and its allies, an expert said A recent Sino-Russian joint air patrol conducted over the waters off Alaska was designed to counter the US military in the Pacific and demonstrated improved interoperability between Beijing’s and Moscow’s forces, a national security expert said. National Defense University associate professor Chen Yu-chen (陳育正) made the comment in an article published on Wednesday on the Web site of the Journal of the Chinese Communist Studies Institute. China and Russia sent four strategic bombers to patrol the waters of the northern Pacific and Bering Strait near Alaska in late June, one month after the two nations sent a combined flotilla of four warships
‘LEADERS’: The report highlighted C.C. Wei’s management at TSMC, Lisa Su’s decisionmaking at AMD and the ‘rock star’ status of Nvidia’s Huang Time magazine on Thursday announced its list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence (AI), which included Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) chairman and chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家), Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) and AMD chair and CEO Lisa Su (蘇姿丰). The list is divided into four categories: Leaders, Innovators, Shapers and Thinkers. Wei and Huang were named in the Leaders category. Other notable figures in the Leaders category included Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Meta CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Su was listed in the Innovators category. Time highlighted Wei’s
EVERYONE’S ISSUE: Kim said that during a visit to Taiwan, she asked what would happen if China attacked, and was told that the global economy would shut down Taiwan is critical to the global economy, and its defense is a “here and now” issue, US Representative Young Kim said during a roundtable talk on Taiwan-US relations on Friday. Kim, who serves on the US House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee, held a roundtable talk titled “Global Ties, Local Impact: Why Taiwan Matters for California,” at Santiago Canyon College in Orange County, California. “Despite its small size and long distance from us, Taiwan’s cultural and economic importance is felt across our communities,” Kim said during her opening remarks. Stanford University researcher and lecturer Lanhee Chen (陳仁宜), lawyer Lin Ching-chi
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) was wooing leaders from across Africa with a banquet on Wednesday night, King Mswati III of Eswatini was notably absent. That is because the kingdom — about the size of New Jersey and with just 1.2 million people — is one of Taiwan’s remaining dozen diplomatic allies. That means Eswatini does not participate in Xi’s Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, the centerpiece of China’s diplomatic outreach to Africa, which was held in Beijing this week. The landlocked nation, which sits between Mozambique and South Africa, is the last holdout in Beijing’s seven-plus decade mission to make Africa
RSS