TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Taoyuan City Mayor Cheng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) apologized Friday (Dec. 2) after National Taiwan University (NTU) told him it had stripped him of a master’s degree over plagiarism issues.

The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) mayor became the latest in a long line of politicians to have been accused of problems with their theses. The party’s candidate to succeed him, former Hsinchu City Mayor Lin Chih-chien (林智堅), withdrew from the race after NTU confirmed his master’s thesis had plagiarism issues, though he continued to claim his innocence.

Cheng announced Friday that NTU had notified him it had found plagiarism problems with his 2011 master’s thesis for the university’s Graduate Institute of National Development, UDN reported. He said he had not been motivated to plagiarize, and the only thing he had done, was fail to attribute quotes from the more than 100 documents he had read and consulted, mainly due to a lack of time.

The use of software to track similarities between different texts by the NTU investigators had revealed problems with his text. However, if that type of software had been required in 2011, he would have found the issue and corrected it by adding footnotes, Cheng said.

The mayor said Friday he had already apologized and explained the problem during a meeting with the NTU review committee, and was willing to apologize again.

Cheng will end his second and final term as mayor of the northern city on Dec. 25.He has been widely tipped as a possible choice for premier or even as the DPP’s candidate in the January 2024 presidential election.

Following the DPP’s poor performance in the Nov. 26 local elections, the party put Cheng in charge of a taskforce to evaluate what had gone wrong. Political commentator and opinion poll specialist Ying-lung You (游盈隆) said the appointment showed President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) was not serious about the lack of internal party democracy and about tracking down the real reasons for the election defeat.

If the DPP wanted to properly evaluate the election results, it first needed to review Tsai’s role in the choice of the candidates and in the campaign, the chairman of the Taiwanese Public Opinion Foundation (TPOF) said.

The president appointed her favorite candidate for succession to head the evaluation taskforce, showing she did not brook any opposition within the DPP, You said.