The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is to start holding regional briefings to promote its referendum proposals next month, KMT Chairman Johnny Chiang (江啟臣) said yesterday.
“Promoting the two KMT referendums is one of the party’s most important political tasks this year,” Chiang told a weekly KMT Central Standing Committee meeting in Taipei.
The KMT has established a task force dedicated to that purpose, he said.
The KMT headquarters, legislative caucus and local chapters, as well as its affiliated National Policy Foundation think tank, are to join forces to promote the proposals, he said.
The goal of the briefings is to make sure that KMT supporters understand that there is progress on the referendum campaigns and to rally support when they are put to vote on Aug. 28, he said.
Chiang said the KMT hopes that through referendums launched by non-governmental organizations, people would determine the direction of the nation’s energy and environmental policies.
“I once again call on the Democratic Progressive Party [DPP] administration to look at all referendums positively,” he said. “It should respect the people’s final decision and obey the people’s will.”
KMT Legislator Lin Wei-chou (林為洲) is leading a petition to hold a referendum on whether the government should impose a complete ban on imports of pork products containing the leanness-enhancing additive ractopamine.
Chiang has initiated a proposal on whether referendums should be held on the same day as national elections if an election is scheduled to take place within six months of a referendum being approved.
A survey released on Tuesday by the Taiwanese Public Opinion Foundation showed that 43.1 percent of respondents thought that the DPP’s ideas and propositions were closer to their own, and 19 percent said that the KMT’s were closer.
In response, the KMT said in a statement that two other polls conducted by TVBS this month showed that support for the DPP and the KMT was about the same.
Results from the Taiwanese Public Opinion Foundation’s survey showed that more than 60 percent of respondents were in favor of overturning the government’s policy of allowing pork imports containing ractopamine through a referendum, and about 54 percent would support a referendum on protecting algal reefs off Taoyuan, the KMT said.
Those results show that the referendum proposals demonstrate public opinion and are not influenced by political parties, it said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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