Heavy metal band Chthonic’s lead vocalist, Freddy Lim (林昶佐), also a founding member of the New Power Party (NPP), yesterday said that he planned to run in next year’s legislative election.
“I will compete for the legislative seat in Taipei’s Daan District (大安),” Lim told the Taipei Times in a telephone interview. “I decided to run in Daan simply because I was born and raised there, and my attachment to the neighborhood prompted me to do something for its residents.”
Lim has rejected the traditional bipolarization of the electorate into pan-blue and pan-green camps, saying that such polarization should no longer be considered effective, as Daan, like any other electoral district, is plural in nature.
“Daan is home to a heterogenous population, which includes people like me — a founding member of a minor party — and the Chinese Nationalist Party’s [KMT] Taipei mayoral candidate in last year’s elections Sean Lien (連勝文),” he said.
The rocker and long-time human rights activist would be pitted against incumbent Chiang Nai-hsin (蔣乃辛) of the KMT in the electoral district, which is traditionally considered a pan-blue stronghold.
Chiang was re-elected as the legislator for Daan in 2012 with 108,488 votes — 60.02 percent of the total votes cast in the district — overpowering his Democratic Progressive Party opponent Chao Shih-chiang (趙士強), who gained only 54,113 ballots, or 29.94 percent of the votes.
Lim’s announcement came shortly after two human rights lawyers from the NPP — Hu Po-yen (胡博硯) and Chiu Hsien-chih (邱顯智) — announced their bids to enter the legislative elections for New Taipei City’s Zhonghe District (中和) and Hsinchu City last week.
The one-month-old NPP advocates a “normalized” national status for Taiwan, promotion of tax reform and improved social security measures, as well as reform to the much maligned Referendum Act (公民投票法).
Lim said that a more thorough statement on his candidacy would be made public tomorrow, likely accompanied by the announcement of the second wave of NPP candidates.
TRICKED INTO MOVING: Local governments in China do not offer any help, and Taiwanese there must compete with Chinese in an unfamiliar setting, a researcher said Beijing’s incentives for Taiwanese businesspeople to invest in China are only intended to lure them across the Taiwan Strait, after which they receive no real support, an expert said on Sunday. Over the past few years, Beijing has been offering a number of incentives that “benefit Taiwanese in name, while benefiting China in reality,” a cross-strait affairs expert said on condition of anonymity. Strategies such as the “31 incentives” are intended to lure Taiwanese talent, capital and technology to help address China’s economic issues while also furthering its “united front” efforts, they said. Local governments in China do not offer much practical
Police have detained a Taoyuan couple suspected of over the past two months colluding with human trafficking rings and employment scammers in Southeast Asia to send nearly 100 Taiwanese jobseekers to Cambodia. At a media briefing in Taipei yesterday, the Criminal Investigation Bureau presented items seized from the couple, including alleged victims’ passports, forged COVID-19 vaccination records, mobile phones, bank documents, checks and cash. The man, surnamed Tsai (蔡), and his girlfriend, surnamed Tsan (詹), were taken into custody last month, after police at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport stopped four jobseekers from boarding a flight to Phnom Penh, said Dustin Lee (李泱輯),
BILINGUAL PLAN: The 17 educators were recruited under a program that seeks to empower Taiwanese, the envoy to the Philippines said The Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in the Philippines on Thursday hosted a send-off event for the first group of English-language teachers from the country who were recruited for a Ministry of Education-initiated program to advance bilingual education in Taiwan. The 14 teachers and three teaching assistants are part of the Taiwan Foreign English Teacher Program, which aims to help find English-language instructors for Taiwan’s public elementary and junior-high schools, the office said. Seventy-seven teachers and 11 teaching assistants from the Philippines have been hired to teach in Taiwan in the coming school year, office data showed. Among the first group is 57-year-old
PUBLIC POLL: More than half believe Chinese drills would make Taiwanese less willing to unify with China, while 36 percent said an invasion was highly unlikely Half of Taiwanese support independence, according to the results of a poll released yesterday by the Taiwanese Public Opinion Foundation, which also found that President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) support rating fell by 7 percentage points. Fifty percent of respondents supported independence, 25.7 percent supported maintaining the “status quo” and 11.8 percent supported unification, while 12.1 percent had no opinion, did not know or refused to answer, the foundation said. Support for independence is the new mainstream opinion, regardless of which party is in power, foundation chairman Michael You (游盈隆) said. Insinuations that Taiwan wants to maintain the “status quo” are a fabrication that