Monday, February 27, 2006

Ma Says Lien Chan is President

Ni Howdy was right. I finally got a chance to listen to the BBC "Hardtalk" interview. Ni Howdy in their excellent take on the Ma interview said


Around minute 13:20 he calls twice-failed presidential candidate Lian Zhan
"President Lian Zhan." Correct?
As far as I can tell, this is correct. At 13:23 Ma does indeed refer to Lien Chan as President. Can anyone else confirm?

UPDATE: Socialforce has a transcript in English. They too have him saying President. Do you think that within the KMT insiders refer to Lien Chan as "President?"

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

LOL. Wasn't Ma saying that China was confusing Lien with 'someone in power'?
Seems to me the confusion lies closer to home than that...
AFAIK, KMT has never conceded the '04 election and never addressed Chen Shui-bian as President.

id_anomaly said...

Yes he said "President Lien Chan"...

the pan-blue would never call a-bian "President Chen" but would not hesitate to say "President Lien"... *sigh*

ps. the socialforce transcipt is mine, proofread by a friend in UK. :)

Tim Maddog said...

I think that what Ma(o) said between all those instances of "oppoooooose" may have actually been "pweznit."

Despite that weird pronunciation, it seemed to me that he is proficient enough in English to know that even though "主席" is sometimes translated as "president," in this case, he should most definitely not be doing so.

Then again, there's also the issue of Lien being given "Eternal Grand Pooh-bah" status by the 輸不起 KMT. So, it may have been a Freudian slip, but it's still a "shit-stained" slip.

By the way, thanks for posting the transcripts, cleverCLAIRE!