Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

Ko’s house woes: a mother’s meddling

Sophia Lee 李欣芬

Chinese-lanuage media recently reported that Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Chairman and presidential candidate Ko Wen-je’s (柯文哲) four-story house in Hsinchu County has an illegal rooftop construction. During the interview, Ko’s mother, Ho Jui-ying (何瑞英), wailed into the microphone that “knives are out for me because my son is running for president,” and shed many tears in front of the camera.

Ko is far from the only one whose candidacy has elicited media interest. All former candidates running for president have been subjected to close scrutiny, regardless of their political affiliation. Ho would be mistaken if she thought she could make the media attention go away or garner sympathy with a few tears.

When ‘white’ is the new black

Taipei Times Editorial

Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Chairman and presidential candidate Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) seems to be in deep water lately. An opinion poll released by online news outlet My-Formosa.com shows that while Vice President William Lai (賴清德) continues to lead with 35.3 percent, New Taipei City Mayor Hou You-yi (侯友宜) has climbed back to second place with 18.8 percent, surpassing Ko’s 15.1 percent.

Yet, the drop in ranking is nothing compared with Ko’s plummeting support among young people, an age group considered Ko’s “iron base.” For the first time, Lai has a much higher support rate in the 20-29 age group with 43.3 percent than Ko’s 27.7 percent; Ko only surpassed Lai by 4 percent in the 30-39 age group.

Focus needs to be advancements

Arthur Chang 張崇廉

Medigen Vaccine Biologics Corp (高端疫苗), the manufacturer of the only domestically made COVID-19 vaccine to have received emergency use authorization in Taiwan, recently announced its out-licensing agreement with the COVID-19 Technology Access Pool (C-TAP) hosted by the WHO and the UN-backed Medicine Patent Pool.

This is the first time that a vaccine manufacturer will use C-TAP to offer its patent and know-how for a COVID-19 vaccine, which should have cleared Medigen’s name after the slander and criticisms hurled at it by opposition parties over the past two years. As it is now election campaign season, opposition parties have focused their fire on criticizing the governing party, yet none of them have offered any constructive policies of their own. Their efforts of casting aspersions at Medigen should have taught them that such behavior would only get them so far in terms of garnering votes. Instead, they should turn to introducing policies for the following issues, as they are pressing challenges that await Taiwan’s next president:

Ko slammed for allegedly linking up with criminals

Taipei Times

Politicians and pundits slammed former Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Chairman and presidential candidate, for allegedly linking up with people with criminal records, politicians convicted of vote-buying, and gangsters in regional offices, following reports yesterday that two TPP executives in Taipei are members of Chinese secret society Hongmen (洪門).

Internet celebrity Liu Yu (劉宇) and others alleged that current heads of the TPP’s Taipei offices in Zhongshan (中山) and Songshan (松山) districts, Chen Ta-yeh (陳大業) and Wang Chen-hung (王振鴻) respectively, are members of the Saint Wenshan Group, Hongmen’s largest network branch in Taiwan.

The accusations came days after TPP executives in Tainan last weekend endorsed the candidacy of Lee Chuan-chiao (李全教), a former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Tainan City Council speaker, who is running as an independent for a legislator seat.

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