Transcript
RICHARD BUSH: Today's topic is "Taiwan's Domestic Politics: Protests, Elections, and Implications." We could have inserted the word, "Indictments." We, of course, didn't know when we scheduled this program that on Friday last week, the prosecutor would issue an indictment against Taiwan's First Lady and suggest that he could have issued an indictment against President Chen Shui-bian if President Chen were not immune from prosecution. But that only makes our session today more exciting.
We are pleased to have so many good panelists today to talk about these events. I hope that we can address both the recent events but also the broad context because the broad context really is important. We see political combat taking place in Taiwan on a variety of fronts, not only corruption and the effort to address it, but also elections fought between the Pan-Blue and the Pan-Green, and there will be an election next month for the Taipei and Kaohsiung mayor, and we will be addressing that in our second panel. There is a pressure to remove President Chen through recall efforts in the Legislative Yuan. There have been demonstrations since September in the streets of Taipei and elsewhere, and there have been defensive efforts on the part of Chen Shui-bian and the DPP.
We will have two panels this morning. The first is to look at the broader political situation. The second one will look at the elections per se.
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