The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) elections for its chairperson and delegates of its National Congress are to be held on July 24, the party announced yesterday.
Those seeking to contest the elections must pick up registration forms on June 3 or 4 and submit them on June 7 or 8, the KMT said in a statement.
Vote counting would begin the same day as the elections, it said, adding that a list of the elected candidates would be announced by July 27.
Photo: CNA
The dates were announced after the KMT’s Central Standing Committee approved them at a meeting in Taipei.
The committee also approved a requirement that candidates for KMT chairperson pay a registration fee of NT$200,000 (US$7,153) when they pick up their registration forms, and a NT$3 million processing fee and NT$10 million deposit when they register, the KMT said.
The deposit would be credited to the winning candidate’s annual fundraising obligations as chairperson and returned to unsuccessful candidates, the party said.
To encourage the participation of young people, the committee approved a rule allowing the chairperson to select up to 30 student delegates to join the 1,550-seat National Congress, the KMT said.
“Party elections are not a head-to-head battle, much less a zero-sum game,” KMT Chairman Johnny Chiang (江啟臣) said at the beginning of the committee meeting, before it was closed to reporters.
Rather, they are an exercise of democracy that decide how work is to be assigned in the party for the following few years, said Chiang, who is seeking re-election.
“We hope that the KMT, united under a fair system, can win back the confidence of a majority of Taiwanese and gain more opportunities to serve the nation, regardless of who is leading it,” he said.
Referendums to be held on Aug. 28 are “not only the party’s most important political task this year, but also a challenge that the whole party must face together,” Chiang said.
“The KMT has no other path but to unite,” he said.
The KMT has made two referendum proposals, one that asks voters if they agree that the government should impose a complete ban on imports of meat, offal and other pork products containing residue of the feed additive ractopamine, and one that asks if they agree that referendums should be held on the same day as national elections if an election is scheduled to take place within six months of a proposal to hold a referendum being approved.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods