Taiwanese independence movement leader Koo Kwang-ming (辜寬敏) yesterday lashed out at Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Chairperson and presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) announcement that maintaining the “status quo” would be her China policy.
“If maintaining the status quo is to be the DPP’s policy, how could I agree with Tsai?” Koo said in response to media queries for comment on Tsai’s policy announcement earlier this month. “It has been 70 years since World War II ended and we have maintained the status quo that whole time, but has Taiwan’s [sovereignty] issue been resolved?”
“We have seen our standing in the international community suffer and if we continue to maintain the status quo, we will never have it,” Koo said. “Maintaining the status quo would be a fatal wound to the nation.”
Photo: Wang Yi-sung, Taipei Times
Koo said that Tsai proposed to maintain the “status quo” because the DPP is unable to come up with better cross-strait policies.
“It is the policy that would bring the least trouble,” Koo said. “However, it is also the most meaningless one.”
Last month, Koo — who encouraged Tainan Mayor William Lai (賴清德) to seek the DPP’s nomination to run in next year’s presidential election — said he would support Tsai after she won the party’s nomination.
However, he seemed to backtrack on that declaration yesterday, saying: “You should find out which came first: my declaration of support for Tsai, or Tsai making the remarks about her China policy.”
He did not elaborate on whether he would continue to support Tsai’s presidential bid.
Koo, who is also the founder of the Taiwan Brain Trust think tank, made the comments at a news conference in Taipei, which the think tank held to release results of a poll on various political issues.
According to the poll results, 46.8 percent of respondents — including 43.8 percent of pan-green and 35.2 percent of pan-blue supporters — said that Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu’s (朱立倫) planned meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) would bring negative effects to the KMT’s presidential and legislative campaigns.
The poll showed that 61.2 percent of the respondents, including 46.6 percent of pan-blue supporters and 80 percent of pan-green supporters, said they are worried that the KMT-Chinese Communist Party forum would accelerate the government’s China-leaning tendency, and thus harm national security.
Taiwan Brain Trust chairman Wu Jung-yi (吳榮義) said the results should be a warning sign to the KMT about its China-leaning policies.
The poll was conducted on Thursday and Friday last week, with 1,068 randomly collected valid samples.
Tropical Storm Nari is not a threat to Taiwan, based on its positioning and trajectory, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Nari has strengthened from a tropical depression that was positioned south of Japan, it said. The eye of the storm is about 2,100km east of Taipei, with a north-northeast trajectory moving toward the eastern seaboard of Japan, CWA data showed. Based on its current path, the storm would not affect Taiwan, the agency said.
The Taipei Department of Health’s latest inspection of fresh fruit and vegetables sold in local markets revealed a 25 percent failure rate, with most contraventions involving excessive pesticide residues, while two durians were also found to contain heavy metal cadmium at levels exceeding safety limits. Health Food and Drug Division Director Lin Kuan-chen (林冠蓁) yesterday said the agency routinely conducts inspections of fresh produce sold at traditional markets, supermarkets, hypermarkets, retail outlets and restaurants, testing for pesticide residues and other harmful substances. In its most recent inspection, conducted in May, the department randomly collected 52 samples from various locations, with testing showing
Taipei and other northern cities are to host air-raid drills from 1:30pm to 2pm tomorrow as part of urban resilience drills held alongside the Han Kuang exercises, Taiwan’s largest annual military exercises. Taipei, New Taipei City, Keelung, Taoyuan, Yilan County, Hsinchu City and Hsinchu County are to hold the annual Wanan air defense exercise tomorrow, following similar drills held in central and southern Taiwan yesterday and today respectively. The Taipei Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) and Maokong Gondola are to run as usual, although stations and passenger parking lots would have an “entry only, no exit” policy once air raid sirens sound, Taipei
Taiwan is bracing for a political shake-up as a majority of directly elected lawmakers from the main opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) face the prospect of early removal from office in an unprecedented wave of recall votes slated for July 26 and Aug. 23. The outcome of the public votes targeting 26 KMT lawmakers in the next two months — and potentially five more at later dates — could upend the power structure in the legislature, where the KMT and the smaller Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) currently hold a combined majority. After denying direct involvement in the recall campaigns for months, the
RSS