In Taichung it's.... Jason!

Dashan Farm in Changhua.

Jason of Taichung announces that he will run again (FocusTaiwan):

If elected, Hu, of the ruling Kuomintang, will have been the longest-serving mayor of Taichung for 17 years over four terms, including a period before Taichung City was merged with neighboring Taichung County into a municipality in late 2010.

Well. I'm taking this as good news. Most of the stuff I wrote about for the last election, which Hu barely won, still applies. Taichung is consistently considered the worst administrated of the island's major cities in public polls, and the locals must surely be looking at Tainan, Taipei, Kaohsiung, and Yilan, and wondering why they can't have that too. Moreover, in addition to the problem with local factions that Hu spurred last time, it seems there are some major splits in the local KMT. One of the island's most prominent gangsters local faction politicians owns one of the island's most prominent entertainment facilities in the city, as well as a local private school chain. Gangsters owning schools is a common set up -- schools are good ways to launder money, being a business with large transactions in cash. This faction politician's wife ran in the last legislative election and lost, thankfully. But he put up some new infrastructure, and can't get the city to give it approval. It sits, unopened, and unusable. He must have pissed somebody off, because prominent gangsters with close connections to the ruling party always get what they want. This might indicate problems within Hu's election machine that could be costly.

Meanwhile Hu's opponent will probably be Lin Jia-lung, the youthful, energetic, hardworking, highly-rated, and squeaky-clean-imaged DPP legislator who has been building up a brand here in Taichung for about a decade. I'm cautiously optimistic that Hu can be had, but then everything depends on the campaign.
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• Asian trade in doldrums as China disappoints
• US suddenly unfunds radar system that Taiwan bought.

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