Former Green Party Taiwan (GPT) secretary-general Pan Han-shen (潘翰聲) and his brother Pan Han-chiang (潘翰疆) founded the Tree Party (樹黨) last month, and nominated 21 candidates for the Nov. 29 nine-in-one elections, saying that the party would represent the interests of trees and wildlife that do not have the ability or right to vote.
The Pan brothers are familiar faces in Taiwan’s environmental movement, while Pan Han-shen has also run in Taipei city councilor and legislative elections representing the GPT.
However, this time around they founded their own party on Aug. 26, with the objectives to run in the upcoming elections and represent the interests of trees, wildlife and the nation’s youth.
“In recent years, global climate change and the heat-island effect have caused temperature increases that destroy quality of life in the city,” Pan Han-shen said while explaining the idea behind the party.
“For instance, nighttime temperatures in Taipei have gone up by three degrees in the past three decades, which is four times higher than the global average. In addition, fast development have left residents of Taipei with only 6m2 of green land per person, which is much lower than all major Asian cities besides Hong Kong,” Pan Han-shen added.
“Therefore, our goal is not only to break the blue-green political deadlock, but to also break the destruction of trees and wildlife,” he said.
The party has nominated 21 candidates to run for borough warden, village warden, township mayor and city councilor positions in Taipei, New Taipei City, Yilan, Hsinchu, Miaoli and Nantou counties, as well as in Greater Taichung, Chiayi and Greater Tainan.
However, the party’s Taipei City councilor nominee, Kao Yi-hsin (高毅心), 23, was ineligible to be registered as a candidate, since the minimum age threshold for the position is 26.
Pan Ching-chu (潘靜竹), the party’s Greater Tainan city councilor candidate, admitted that it is a big challenge for her to fight for election, given the political environment.
“However, through running in the election I would also advertise my ideas for more transparency in politics and break the polarized blue-green politics in the nation,” she said.
Reacting to the founding of the Tree Party and its nomination of candidates, the GPT said in a statement issued yesterday that it has asked Pan Han-shen and Pan Han-chiang to withdraw from the party.
However, it added that it highly supports the Tree Party’s ideas and would not rule out the possibility of the two parties collaborating in future.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods