Accusations of a plagiarized report sparked a denial and a war of words — along with promises to sue and defiance in the face of such threats — as politicians clashed yesterday.
Taipei City Councilor Wang Hung-wei (王鴻薇) said a thesis that Hsinchu Mayor Lin Chih-chien (林智堅) submitted while studying in a master’s program at Chung Hua University drew most of its content from a paper that was released a month earlier.
Lin, the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) nominee for the Taoyuan mayoral election in November, denied the allegation, adding that he is mulling legal action against Wang, a member of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT).
Photo: Cheng Ming-hsiang, Taipei Times
Wang told a news conference that the Hsinchu Science Park Administration had penned an unpublished study titled An Evaluation of the Approval of Hsinchu Science Park Residents with the Taiwan Consumer Satisfaction Index Model in June 2008.
One month later, Lin published his thesis, An Evaluation of the Approval of Residents of a Certain Domestic Science Park with the Taiwan Consumer Satisfaction Index Model, she said.
The methodology, datasets and 88 percent of the written content, including typing errors, were identical across the two documents, Wang said, adding that original content comprised only seven of the 49 pages of Lin’s paper.
Photo: CNA
The university should rescind Lin’s degree and the Hinschu City Government should investigate whether the mayor contravened intellectual property laws, she said.
“Lin’s act of plagiarism is a breach of the academic code of conduct and also quite likely a breach of the government’s intellectual property rights,” she said. “Lin has lost all political credibility; the man should return his degree and drop out of the [Taoyuan] race.”
Lin told a separate news conference at noon at the Hsinchu City Government that “[the allegation] is old news that media reports covered two weeks ago.”
Allegations of plagiarism are rehashed leading up to nearly every election I contest and they are repeatedly debunked by my campaign and the faculty of my alma maters, he said.
“I have never plagiarized any paper while attending Chung Hua University or National Taiwan University,” he said. “I will defend my good name and I will meet with my attorneys to discuss pressing charges.”
Candidates should appeal to voters by proposing policies instead of smearing their opponents, he said.
Later yesterday, Wang said she welcomed a court battle.
“A lawsuit would be welcomed as an opportunity for a court to verify Lin’s plagiarism,” she said.
Separately, Former legislator Ko Chih-en (柯志恩), the KMT’s candidate for the Kaohsiung mayoral election, was accused of breaching ethics rules while studying education.
Ko submitted nearly identical manuscripts to two conferences in 2004, constituting self-plagiarism and contravening duplicate publication rules in academia, a post on Facebook submitted by an account named Wen Ta-jui (翁達瑞) said.
Ko denied the allegations, saying that she “will not tolerate her character being smeared.”
Ko on Monday filed a libel suit at the Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office against the administrator of the Wen Ta-jui Facebook account.
Additional reporting by Ke Yu-hao
A decision to describe a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement on Singapore’s Taiwan policy as “erroneous” was made because the city-state has its own “one China policy” and has not followed Beijing’s “one China principle,” Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Tien Chung-kwang (田中光) said yesterday. It has been a longstanding practice for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to speak on other countries’ behalf concerning Taiwan, Tien said. The latest example was a statement issued by the PRC after a meeting between Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財) and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on the sidelines of the APEC summit
The Taipei Zoo on Saturday said it would pursue legal action against a man who was filmed climbing over a railing to tease and feed spotted hyenas in their enclosure earlier that day. In videos uploaded to social media on Saturday, a man can be seen climbing over a protective railing and approaching a ledge above the zoo’s spotted hyena enclosure, before dropping unidentified objects down to two of the animals. The Taipei Zoo in a statement said the man’s actions were “extremely inappropriate and even illegal.” In addition to monitoring the hyenas’ health, the zoo would collect evidence provided by the public
A road safety advocacy group yesterday called for reforms to the driver licensing and retraining system after a pedestrian was killed and 15 other people were injured in a two-bus collision in Taipei. “Taiwan’s driver’s licenses are among the easiest to obtain in the world, and there is no mandatory retraining system for drivers,” Taiwan Vision Zero Alliance, a group pushing to reduce pedestrian fatalities, said in a news release. Under the regulations, people who have held a standard car driver’s license for two years and have completed a driver training course are eligible to take a test
Taiwan’s passport ranked 34th in the world, with access to 141 visa-free destinations, according to the latest update to the Henley Passport Index released today. The index put together by Henley & Partners ranks 199 passports globally based on the number of destinations holders can access without a visa out of 227, and is updated monthly. The 141 visa-free destinations for Taiwanese passport holders are a slight decrease from last year, when holders had access to 145 destinations. Botswana and Columbia are among the countries that have recently ended visa-free status for Taiwanese after “bowing to pressure from the Chinese government,” the Ministry