Residents in Taoyuan’s Jhongli District (中壢) yesterday voted to recall Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Taoyuan City Councilor Wang Hao-yu (王浩宇).
Taoyuan City Election Commission data showed that 84,582 people voted in favor of the recall, while 7,128 voted against it.
Voter turnout was 28 percent, it showed.
Photo: Lee Jung-ping, Taipei Times
The votes of at least 25 percent of eligible voters — 81,940 people — and the largest share of votes in favor of a recall are required for a recall motion to pass, according to the Civil Servants Election and Recall Act (公職人員選舉罷免法).
Wang, 32, was first elected as city councilor in 2014, with the second-highest votes among all candidates for Jhongli. He at the time represented the Green Party Taiwan.
He was in 2018 re-elected with the third-highest number of votes.
In January last year, he left the Green Party and a month later joined the DPP.
Hope Media executive officer Tang Ping-jung (唐平榮), a Jhongli resident who proposed the recall campaign said that Wang did not work for the benefit of his constituency.
The campaign was supported by local Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) members.
Wang pushed his own opinions on public issues, instead of listening to those who he was elected to represent, Tang said after the vote, celebrating with KMT and TPP members at the headquarters of the campaign.
It is the first time that a city councilor in one of Taiwan’s six special municipalities is recalled, he said.
DPP spokeswoman Yen Juo-fang (顏若芳) said that despite the vote being a local issue, “the KMT threw its whole weight behind it.”
“The campaign was aimed to sow division among Taiwanese. This does not bode well for the nation’s democracy, and most people did not like to see this,” she said.
The KMT in a statement congratulated the “people of Jhongli for sending a strong signal.”
“It was a good result and benefits Taiwan’s democratic development,” the KMT said.
As of press time, Wang had not commented on the recall vote.
Additional reporting by Shih Hsiao-kuang
‘CORNERED ENEMY’: China’s rise is threatening peace and stability, and the US would aim to restrict it with help from allies in the Asia-Pacific, Soong Hseik-wen said A draft bill on protecting Taiwan from invasion is likely to be passed by the US Congress, but it remains to be seen how US President Joe Biden’s administration would implement the act if it is passed, Taiwanese academics said on Sunday. US Senator Rick Scott and US Representative Guy Reschenthaler on Thursday reintroduced the proposed Taiwan Invasion Prevention Act, which was shelved in September last year due to the impending US presidential election. Arthur Ding (丁樹範), a professor at National Chengchi University’s College of International Affairs, and Soong Hseik-wen (宋學文), a professor at National Chung Cheng University’s Graduate Institute
OVERHAUL NEEDED: The government should improve its agricultural processing capabilities and expand to new markets to limit its reliance on China, an expert said China’s ban on Taiwanese pineapples was “unsurprising,” and Taiwan should have years ago altered its produce export strategies and target customers, experts said. China on Friday abruptly suspended imports of pineapples from Taiwan, saying that it had on multiple occasions discovered “harmful biological entities” on the fruit. Calling it an “unfriendly” move, the Council of Agriculture (COA) said that 99.79 percent of the pineapples sent to China since last year have met China’s import standards. Chiao Chun (焦鈞), the author of Fruits and Politics — A Recollection of Cross-strait Agricultural Interaction Over the Past Decade (水果政治學:兩岸農業交流十年回顧與展望), said that China’s announcement is clearly targeting
‘NOT COLD ENOUGH’: Schools are disregarding Premier Su Tseng-chang’s instruction that students may wear out-of-uniform clothing to stay warm, an association said An investigative report revealed that 72.5 percent of the nation’s senior-high schools and 95.6 percent of junior-high schools punish students for wearing unapproved winter clothes in contravention of educational guidelines, lawmakers and student rights advocates said yesterday. Speaking at a news conference at the Legislative Yuan, the Taiwan Youth Association for Democracy said there is an endemic disregard for the Ministry of Education’s regulations and that private schools are more likely to contravene ministry rules. The report is a compilation of 2,856 student reports about dress code reinforcement at 425 high schools and vocational high schools, the association said. Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌)
DISSATISFACTION? If the referendums collect more than 700,000 signatures each, they would have gotten the most signatures in the shortest time, the party said The Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) two referendum petitions — one on banning the importation of pork with traces of ractopamine and the other on holding referendums on the same day as national elections — had as of Thursday gathered 691,398 and 674,497 signatures respectively, the party said yesterday. If the petitions collect more than 700,000 signatures apiece, they would have garnered the most signatures in the shortest time since the Referendum Act (公民投票法) was amended in 2017, party officials said. The KMT proposed the “anti-ractopamine pork” or “food safety” referendum just days after President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) announcement on Aug. 28 last