“This will be a difficult and lopsided competition, as we are confronting a campaign team aided by administrative resources,” Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Yunlin County commissioner candidate Chang Li-shan (張麗善) said of her electoral contest against the Democratic Progressive Party’s Lee Chin-yung (李進勇).
However, Chang, the sister of former Yunlin county commissioner Chang Jung-wei (張榮味), said that if she shows her sincerity in envisioning a better future for the DPP-run county, she can win.
While Lee’s campaign theme is “Sunlight City,” Chang Li-shan is promoting a “Blue Ocean Yunlin,” or a smart county that is competitive, effective with “big service” and equipped with strong digital technology.
In a recent interview with the Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper), she said she would turn Yunlin from a place that has been ranked at the bottom in terms of competitiveness and happiness to a safe place for enterprises, families and individuals.
The “big service” concept is about providing empathetic care to establish an administrative service team and a welfare system in which residents will not be helpless if they need assistance, she said.
Realizing the “smart city” idea involves boosting administrative efficiency and performance to nurture Yunlin’s competitiveness and construct a county with digital technology infrastructure underpinned by software and hardware that surpass that of other cities and counties in the nation, she said.
Achieving these goals will require tackling the county government’s fiscal problems head on, Chang Li-shan said.
Revising the Act Governing the Allocation of Government Revenues and Expenditures (財政收支劃分法) to ensure a fairer, more reasonable allocation of tax revenue is only one of several possible solutions, she said.
Local administrative efficacy and the development of agricultural economics have to be promoted, the county’s investment environment needs to be improved and job opportunities must be created to increase both Yunlin’s population and income levels, which in turn would improve the county government’s fiscal position, she said.
The KMT candidate’s first campaign commercial was about providing free lunches for elementary-school students. This idea was criticized by Lee’s team, which said that since it would be a welfare policy, its benefits would exclude the wealthy, as per regulations.
Chang Li-shan dismissed the criticism, saying that welfare policymaking has long steered away from excluding the rich to helping everyone in “need.” In addition, providing students with a free lunch is an educational policy to secure children’s equal right to education and should not exclude any group, including “the haves.”
Turning back to Yunlin’s finances, she said the Act Governing the Allocation of Government Revenues and Expenditures has a mechanism to reward cities and counties that attract business investment, and she secured NT$500 million (US$16.5 million) to maintain Yunlin’s roads when she was a legislator.
The annual output of the Formosa Plastic Group’s naphtha cracker is valued as high as NT$2 trillion, so Yunlin County definitely deserves more than other cities and counties whose special budgets are allotted by the central government, she said.
She also called for greater transparency and the institutionalization of a feedback mechanism about the cracker for Yunlin residents.
The feedback mechanism would be institutionalized by conducting negotiations between central and local governments, enterprises and the people, and the transparency would be implemented by securing residents’ rights to supervise and review how the cracker uses public resources such as water, air and coastal resources, she said.
This is the second time that Chang Li-shan has run for Yunlin County commissioner. She campaigned for the December 2009 election, but pulled out of the race in late September.
STATS: Taiwan’s average life expectancy of 80.77 years was lower than that of Japan, Singapore and South Korea, but higher than in China, Malaysia and Indonesia Taiwan’s average life expectancy last year increased to 80.77 years, but was still not back to its pre-COVID-19 pandemic peak of 81.32 years in 2020, the Ministry of the Interior said yesterday. The average life expectancy last year increased the 0.54 years from 2023, the ministry said in a statement. For men and women, the average life expectancy last year was 77.42 years and 84.30 years respectively, up 0.48 years and 0.56 years from the previous year. Taiwan’s average life expectancy peaked at 81.32 years in 2020, as the nation was relatively unaffected by the pandemic that year. The metric
Taiwan High Speed Rail Corp. (THSRC) plans to ease strained capacity during peak hours by introducing new fare rules restricting passengers traveling without reserved seats in 2026, company Chairman Shih Che (史哲) said Wednesday. THSRC needs to tackle its capacity issue because there have been several occasions where passengers holding tickets with reserved seats did not make it onto their train in stations packed with individuals traveling without a reserved seat, Shih told reporters in a joint interview in Taipei. Non-reserved seats allow travelers maximum flexibility, but it has led to issues relating to quality of service and safety concerns, especially during
A magnitude 5.1 earthquake struck Chiayi County at 4:37pm today, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. The hypocenter was 36.3km southeast of Chiayi County Hall at a depth of 10.4km, CWA data showed. There were no immediate reports of damage resulting from the quake. The intensity of the quake, which gauges the actual effect of a seismic event, measured 4 in Chiayi County, Tainan and Kaohsiung on Taiwan's seven-tier intensity scale, the data showed. The quake had an intensity of 3 in Chiayi City and Yunlin County, while it was measured as 2 in Pingtung, Taitung, Hualien, Changhua, Nantou and Penghu counties, the data
The Supreme Court today rejected an appeal filed by former Air Force officer Shih Chun-cheng (史濬程), convicted of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) espionage, finalizing his sentence at two years and two months for contravening the National Security Act (國家安全法). His other ruling, a ten-month sentence for an additional contravention, was meanwhile overturned and sent to the Taichung branch of the High Court for retrial, the Supreme Court said today. Prosecutors have been notified as Shih is considered a flight risk. Shih was recruited by Chinese Communist Party (CCP) intelligence officials after his retirement in 2008 and appointed as a supervisor