Kaohsiung City Councilor Yang Ming-jou (楊明州) yesterday took the helm as Kaohsiung acting mayor, stepping into the vacancy left by the recall of former mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜).
Yang, who was appointed by the Executive Yuan on Friday after the Central Election Commission officially confirmed Han’s recall, took the oath of office with Cabinet Secretary-General Li Meng-yen (李孟諺) acting as witness.
Yang, who served as deputy mayor under former Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) mayor Chen Chu (陳菊), is to remain in the post until the city chooses a new mayor in an Aug. 15 by-election.
Photo: Wang Jung-hsiang, Taipei Times
The 64-year-old Yang has been working for the Kaohsiung City Government since 1984. After Han became mayor in December 2018, he appointed Yang to be the city’s secretary-general. Yang served in the post for eight months before being reassigned as a councilor.
Although he would fill the mayoral post for only about two months, Yang said that he would do his best, adding that he would coordinate with colleagues to mitigate flood damage in the upcoming typhoon season.
His administration would continue to carry out public work projects in the city, as any delay to infrastructure improvements just because of a reshuffle in the city government would be unacceptable, Yang added.
Han, of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), became the first mayor in Taiwan to be recalled.
On June 6, 939,090 Kaohsiung voters cast their ballots in favor of his removal — a much higher total than the 574,996 required, the legal threshold representing 25 percent of Kaohsiung’s eligible voters.
Vice Premier Chen Chi-mai (陳其邁) has emerged as has emerged as the DPP’s favored candidate for the by-election.
The Taiwan People’s Party is reportedly considering some form of cooperation with the KMT in the by-election, although it said that it remains open to other options.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
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The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
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