Former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) yesterday accused Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei mayoral candidate Sean Lien (連勝文) of spending too much effort on muddling, and too little energy on explaining how he would make Taipei a better city.
“I wouldn’t comment on who is a better [candidate], because each of them have their pluses and minuses,” Lee said in response to media queries about the candidates in the Taipei mayoral election.
Lee was speaking on the sidelines of a conference in Taipei on the Sino-Japanese War that ended with the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1894 and led to the Japanese takeover of Taiwan in 1895. He delivered a speech at the conference.
Photo: Lin Cheng-kung, Taipei Times
“My advice is that candidates should stop conducting smear campaigns and clearly tell the public how they would make Taipei a better city,” Lee told reporters.
Commenting on Lien’s recent newspaper ads attacking independent Taipei mayoral candidate Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) and his campaign team, Lee said that “everyone knows what kind of person he [Lien] is. Instead of spending so much time and money on this, he should be focused on city governance.”
“That’s just muddling,” he added.
Lee said that as the leader of a capital, there is much that the city government could do. For instance, he said that there is room for improvement in the Government Procurement Act (政府採購法), which stipulates that the contractor who submits the lowest tender for public construction tenders should be given the job.
“But the problem is, with lower budgets, contractors would try to cut down on costs everywhere and the quality of public construction projects would be compromised as a result,” he said. “This is something that can be improved.”
Lee said he served as Taipei mayor from 1978 to 1981 and knows very well that the job is challenging, but he believes there is always a solution to any problem when a mayor stays focused.
He also commented on the lawsuit between the KMT and Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) on Wang’s party membership, saying the KMT should consider giving up the lawsuit.
“The KMT should be ashamed of filing a lawsuit against Wang using evidence collected through illegal wiretapping,” Lee said. “As former prosecutor-general Huang Shih-ming (黃世銘) has been found guilty [of illegally leaking confidential information gathered through an illegal wiretap of Wang’s telephone], the KMT should consider whether it should give up the lawsuit.”
Lee was referring to an illegal lobbying allegation involving Wang and Democratic Progressive Party Caucus Whip Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘) based on a voice recording of a telephone conversation between the two.
However, Huang was later prosecuted and found guilty of leaking information, as he showed case files to President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and Premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) when the case was still under investigation by the judiciary.
At the same time, the KMT and Wang have been involved in a legal battle about whether Wang should lose his party membership. The KMT has twice lost the case in court, yet is still trying to appeal the court’s decision.
Lee yesterday also panned the recent cooking oil scandals as a result of improper relations between large corporates and politicians.
“The government should be working in the interests of the nation and the public, not some business leaders,” Lee 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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater