LIMITED EDITION:The white banks were meant to invoke the AP’s ‘Robin Hood’ heroine image of the DPP’s presidential candidate, Tsai Ing-wen
By Chris Wang / Staff Reporter
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) yesterday distributed 20,000 limited-edition white piggy banks in its latest promotion for its “three little pigs” fund-raising effort.
The white piggy banks are decorated with Robin Hood hat stickers, making references to DPP presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) as the mythical British outlaw as after a recent Associated Press story described Tsai as a “Robin Hood-like heroine.”
“This is an ‘iPig’ rather than an ‘iPad,’” DPP spokesperson Lin Chun-hsien (林俊憲) said.
Like their less nattily attired predecessor piggy banks, the DPP would like the Robin Hood ones returned to DPP campaign headquarters on Dec. 10. Lin estimated that at least 300,000 piggy banks have been distributed nationwide since the beginning of the campaign.
The “piggy banks” campaign stems from an incident last month when the DPP had to return three piggy banks donated by three-year-old triplets after the Control Yuan warned that the donations were in violation of the Act Governing Political Donations (政治獻金管理條例) because the donors were not of voting age.
The law stipulates that only people of voting age and those who meet other eligibility rules are allowed to make political donations.
The incident sparked a craze among Tsai’s supporters for making donations to the party in piggy banks. The party has produced a banks in a variety of colors, including pink in Greater Kaohsiung and black in Taipei.
Additional reporting by staff writer