Hsinchu Mayor Lin Chih-chien (林智堅) yesterday accepted the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) nomination to run for Taoyuan mayor in the Nov. 26 local elections, saying he is ready to renew the party’s administration of the city.
His announcement came a day after the DPP’s Central Executive Committee approved a proposal from the election strategy committee to nominate Lin without holding a primary.
Taoyuan Mayor Cheng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) of the DPP cannot seek re-election, as he has reached the two-term limit.
Photo: Hung Mei-hsiu, Taipei Times
Lin told a news conference that the “fair city of Taoyuan cannot go backward” and that he is ready to pick up Chen’s mantle.
He attended the conference via video link, as he is undergoing COVID-19 quarantine.
The election would not be a race between the pan-green and pan-blue camps, but a fight to defend progress, he said.
Lin and Chen became mayors in 2014 after capturing cities deemed Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) strongholds and then won re-election.
Lin said he would seek counsel from DPP leaders and voters while canvassing Taoyuan’s 13 districts.
His election campaign would be carried out in cooperation with the party’s city council candidates in a bid to secure all of the council seats in the city, he said.
Lin said that DPP Legislator Cheng Yun-peng (鄭運鵬), and former legislators Cheng Pao-ching (鄭寶清), Huang Shih-cho (黃適卓), Huang Shier-chieg (黃世傑) and Peng Shao-chin (彭紹瑾) would support his candidacy.
Lin said his administration in Hsinchu has transformed the municipality into something more than a pass-through city.
Asked about his support for creating a special municipality by merging the Hsinchu city and county in addition to Taoyuan, Lin said that the opposition has torpedoed the proposal for the time being, but he would continue to support it.
The three jurisdictions should be integrated into an administrative region, as they already form a metropolitan area in practice, he said.
Lin said he looks forward to working with the next Hsinchu mayor to make the proposal a reality.
Lin said that his wife, Liao Yu-Shen (廖欲伸), has misgivings about his candidacy out of concern for his health and worries about KMT smear campaigns.
Liao remains firmly committed to the family’s political ideals despite these fears, he said.
China’s Office of the Commissioner of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Hong Kong has asked foreign consulates in Hong Kong to submit details of their local staff, which is more proof that the “one country, two systems” model no longer exists, a Taiwanese academic said. The office sent letters dated Monday last week to consulates in the territory, giving them one month to submit the information it requires. The move followed Beijing’s attempt to obtain floor plans for all properties used by foreign missions in Hong Kong last year, which raised concerns among diplomats that the information could be used for
‘ABNORMITY’: News of the military exercises on the coast of the Chinese province facing Taiwan were made public by the Ministry of National Defense on Thursday Taiwan’s military yesterday said it has detected the Chinese military initiating a round of exercises at a bay area in coastal Fujian Province, which faces Taiwan, since early yesterday morning and it has been closely monitoring the drills. The exercises being conducted at Fujian’s Dacheng Bay featured an undisclosed number of People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) warplanes, warships and ground troops, the Ministry of National Defense said in a press statement. The ministry did not disclose what kind of military exercises are being conducted there and for how long they would be happening, but it did say that it has been closely watching
Vice President William Lai (賴清德) yesterday said that Beijing was trying to “annex” Taiwan, while China said its recent series of drills near Taiwan are aimed at combating the “arrogance” of separatist forces. The Ministry of National Defense earlier this month said that it had observed dozens of Chinese fighters, drones, bombers and other aircraft, as well as warships and the Chinese aircraft carrier Shandong, operating nearby. The increased frequency of China’s military activities has raised the risk of events “getting out of hand” and sparking an accidental clash, Minister of National Defense Chiu Kuo-cheng (邱國正) said last week. Asked about the spurt
Noting that researchers have found that 85 China-based blogs and accounts were spreading a conspiracy theory that a US “meteorological weapon” had caused recent fires in Hawaii, political observers in Taiwan said the nation also needs to be vigilant of Beijing employing similar disinformation campaigns against Taiwan. The untrue content concerning Hawaii was written in 15 languages and disseminated across a myriad of platforms including Facebook, YouTube and X, a report published in Gizmodo said, citing NewsGuard, an online news content ranker. The effort represented the most expansive Chinese informational operation to be uncovered by NewsGuard to date, Gizmodo said. The conspiracy theory
RSS