Former Kaohsiung County commissioner Yu Chen Yueh-ying (余陳月瑛) died on Sunday night at the age of 87 surrounded by her family.
She passed away at the Kaoshiung Chang Gung Memorial Hospital in Greater Kaohsiung, her family said yesterday.
Yu Chen’s body was sent back to the family’s old residence in Ciaotou yesterday morning.
A member of the “Yu family” that dominated then-Kaohsiung County politics for more than three decades, Yu Chen was the daughter-in-law of Yu Teng-fa (余登發), who was the county’s commissioner from 1960 to 1963.
She began her political career by running for the Taiwan Provincial Council in 1963 and serving in the body for four terms.
She narrowly lost a bid in 1981 to head the now defunct Kaohsiung County government.
She lost to Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) adversary Tsai Ming-yao (蔡明耀) by only a few thousand votes.
However, in 1982, she was elected to serve in the Legislative Yuan, where she defeated Tsai in the election for Kaohsiung County magistrate in 1985. She held the position for two terms, until 1993.
Yu Chen was succeeded by her son, Yu Cheng-hsien (余政憲), who also headed the county for two four-year terms and served as interior minister from 2002 to 2004 in the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government.
Yu Chen was an adviser to former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) when the DPP held power.
Greater Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu (陳菊) expressed her condolences over Yu Chen’s death and commended her as a model of women’s participation in public affairs.
Kaohsiung County merged with Kaohsiung City to form a single special municipality on Dec. 25, 2010.
Taiwan yesterday condemned the recent increase in Chinese coast guard-escorted fishing vessels operating illegally in waters around the Pratas Islands (Dongsha Islands, 東沙群島) in the South China Sea. Unusually large groupings of Chinese fishing vessels began to appear around the islands on Feb. 15, when at least six motherships and 29 smaller boats were sighted, the Coast Guard Administration (CGA) said in a news release. While CGA vessels were dispatched to expel the Chinese boats, Chinese coast guard ships trespassed into Taiwan’s restricted waters and unsuccessfully attempted to interfere, the CGA said. Due to the provocation, the CGA initiated an operation to increase
A crowd of over 200 people gathered outside the Taipei District Court as two sisters indicted for abusing a 1-year-old boy to death attended a preliminary hearing in the case yesterday afternoon. The crowd held up signs and chanted slogans calling for aggravated penalties in child abuse cases and asking for no bail and “capital punishment.” They also held white flowers in memory of the boy, nicknamed Kai Kai (剴剴), who was allegedly tortured to death by the sisters in December 2023. The boy died four months after being placed in full-time foster care with the
CHANGING LANDSCAPE: Many of the part-time programs for educators were no longer needed, as many teachers obtain a graduate degree before joining the workforce, experts said Taiwanese universities this year canceled 86 programs, Ministry of Education data showed, with educators attributing the closures to the nation’s low birthrate as well as shifting trends. Fifty-three of the shuttered programs were part-time postgraduate degree programs, about 62 percent of the total, the most in the past five years, the data showed. National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) discontinued the most part-time master’s programs, at 16: chemistry, life science, earth science, physics, fine arts, music, special education, health promotion and health education, educational psychology and counseling, education, design, Chinese as a second language, library and information sciences, mechatronics engineering, history, physical education
The Shanlan Express (山嵐號), or “Mountain Mist Express,” is scheduled to launch on April 19 as part of the centennial celebration of the inauguration of the Taitung Line. The tourism express train was renovated from the Taiwan Railway Corp’s EMU500 commuter trains. It has four carriages and a seating capacity of 60 passengers. Lion Travel is arranging railway tours for the express service. Several news outlets were invited to experience the pilot tour on the new express train service, which is to operate between Hualien Railway Station and Chihshang (池上) Railway Station in Taitung County. It would also be the first tourism service
RSS