He just announced his candidacy.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perennial_candidate
“Hotte Paksha Rangaswamy was a political leader from the Indian state of Karnataka, who had a penchant for contesting elections. He is a Guinness World Record holder for having contested the highest number of elections - he unsuccessfully did so 86 times.”
His candidacy motto: let us find a way…
OK, say what you will about his spotty past record, his strange pandering to young people and progressives, and his complete obsession with Sun Yat-sen… This man really knows how to give a speech.
Wow, just wow. Ma Ying-jeou on his best of days could never meet half the standard of the speech Soong just gave.
The poster of him naked, covered in mud and holding a plant cutting is a very disturbing image. It looks gross.
It’s fun listening to his accents as well. Soong commands a accent that is pretty much the Mandarin standard in Taiwan. However, right after he said all the obligatory Taigi and Hakka greetings, his first Mandarin words, 謝謝, was pronounced with a Taigi influenced /siɛ siɛ/ instead of the standard /ɕiɛ ɕiɛ/, in a way that if you didn’t know who’s doing the talking, you might mistake him for A-bian. It’s interesting because right because the Taigi and Hakka greetings, his last Mandarin word was also 謝謝, which he said with a pitch perfect (Taiwan) Standard Mandarin. He did this quite a bit throughout the speech. 
It’s adorable in a way.
See that part of the speech:
youtu.be/tn0hUDjDcQg?t=1h4m21s
There are a couple of words he consistently did without conforming to the standard. He would say 內 as /ləɪ/ instead of /nəɪ/ and He would say 事 as /sɨ/ instead of /ʂɨ/. However, his pronunciation for 史 seems to hang in between /sɨ/ and /ʂɨ/, and his 失 is a pitch perfect /ʂɨ/.
Soong’s is originally from Hunan, I’m not sure how much of his special accent is from his Hunan background, and how much it’s from the influence of other native languages of Taiwan.
His Taigi is certainly subpar though.
I liked the first part of the speech, the part about the student protests. It sounded a bit more improvised, normal speech, and not as stylized. I’m not a fan of the stylized pitches in speeches I guess. The speech itself is very very well written.
I’m sure that’s mud from some famous hot spring resort.
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He gets his Ls and Ns backward. It’s kind of cute. “我凌可…而不要”
That picture…yuck…
Anyway…
I don’t think he will overtake Tsai, but I don’t blame him for thinking this may be his chance. Hung is a horrible candidate, and Soong may have a chance of taking a majority of the blue-leaning votes. I just think he’s viewed too much as “old guard” or “establishment” to take enough of the young vote from Tsai.
You should have listened to today’s speech then! He’s not mainstream enough to actually do it, but if people compared his speech to Tsai’s and Hung’s, it would be clear that there’s only one professional in this race.
You should have listened to today’s speech then! He’s not mainstream enough to actually do it, but if people compared his speech to Tsai’s and Hung’s, it would be clear that there’s only one professional in this race.[/quote]
Interestingly, Soong left out his cross-strait policies from his speech. Soong offered a KMT style retelling of the past, and talked about increasing cross-strait communications. Those topics are very outdated. He didn’t address how to continue the current relations, other than he would not use black box to pass anything.
He would instead focus on how his presidency would end bi-partisanship. He also says he would push for a modification to the constitution. If the KMT falls apart after the next election, then that might be possible, although Tsai would probably do the same.
Soong almost pulled a Obama style “there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America, there’s the United States of America.” He said “we don’t need pan-Blue unity, or pan-Green unity”, but he stopped sort of literrally saying we need “Taiwan unity.”
I also hope that future Taiwanese politicians would stop referring to themselves in third person in speeches…
You should have listened to today’s speech then! He’s not mainstream enough to actually do it, but if people compared his speech to Tsai’s and Hung’s, it would be clear that there’s only one professional in this race.[/quote]
I’ll take a listen later on.
someone once said “once a traitor, always a traitor”
Soong screwed his KMT comrades and ran for president in 2000. We all know the result of that.
This time around, he just made himself the most likely of all 3 candidates to betray the people of Taiwan. Most likely to sell out Taiwan to the People’s Republic.
I prefer a corrupt politician over a politician with hidden agenda.
You should have listened to today’s speech then! He’s not mainstream enough to actually do it, but if people compared his speech to Tsai’s and Hung’s, it would be clear that there’s only one professional in this race.[/quote]
As his last two election results showed, the people of Taiwan do not share your opinion, however pro his rhetorical skills may be. I seem to remember he got between 2.5 and 4 percent.
Just like Trump, he is talking to a certain constituency, the ones that have already made their mind up. Problem as I see it is that he and Hung are actually courting the same folks, the pro China so blue they are red got my money in the Caribbean, my kids in Switzerland or the States, my real estate in Shanghai, my factories in Vietnam, my pension from the gummit constituency.
[quote=“schwarzwald”]
As his last two election results showed, the people of Taiwan do not share your opinion, however pro his rhetorical skills may be. I seem to remember he got between 2.5 and 4 percent.[/quote]
he got more votes than Lian Chan back in 2000.
[quote=“hansioux”][quote=“schwarzwald”]
As his last two election results showed, the people of Taiwan do not share your opinion, however pro his rhetorical skills may be. I seem to remember he got between 2.5 and 4 percent.[/quote]
he got more votes than Lian Chan back in 2000.[/quote]
That’s right, but that dwindled to 2.77% in 2012.
[quote=“Taiwanguy”]That picture…yuck…
Anyway…
I don’t think he will overtake Tsai, but I don’t blame him for thinking this may be his chance. Hung is a horrible candidate, and Soong may have a chance of taking a majority of the blue-leaning votes. I just think he’s viewed too much as “old guard” or “establishment” to take enough of the young vote from Tsai.[/quote]
He won’t win over the young votes because young people have social media that won’t let them forget some of the things that Soong did.
Many of Soong’s past actions were in stark contrast to his speech today, such as saying put aside blue green bipartisanship for unity, but in the past he said:
ah… how radical those DPP incited protesters are today…
Tsai’s team is probably breaking open the champagne.
Soong has been shifting his rhetoric to appear to light blues who are disenchanted with Ma & Hung’s unification stance. Don’t know if it’ll work, but there’s an opening for him with that strategy in thanks to the political vacuum the KMT’s collapse is creating.