Taiwan will not open the median line of the Taiwan Strait to air traffic because the area is used for training by the country’s air force, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said on Thursday.
At present, direct flights between Taiwan and China are routed over the East China Sea and South China Sea rather than directly across the Taiwan Strait.
“We have told [Beijing] very clearly before that we will not open the median line. We are not trying to make things difficult. It’s about national security,” Ma said on Thursday in Panama City at a gathering with Taiwanese reporters during his trip to Central America.
Ma made the remarks in response to a call by Wang Yi (王毅) the director of China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, that Taiwan open the median line because of increasing numbers of direct cross-strait flights.
As to the establishment of a military mutual trust mechanism, Ma said such a framework could be forged only after the signing of a peace agreement with China.
“While the two sides indeed have to strike a cross-strait peace pact, we believe it’s not an issue of great urgency at the moment,” Ma said.
Ma said the government would focus its efforts on the negotiation of an economic cooperation framework agreement.
“What’s more urgent at the moment is to solve the issues that matter more to the public. Normalizing cross-strait economic relations, for example, is very important to Taiwan,” Ma said.
When asked whether he would meet Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) in his capacity as Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairman, Ma said he had no immediate plans to meet Hu. It would be better for leaders across the Taiwan Strait to meet after the two sides have found solutions to certain fundamental issues, he said.
Ma is expected to take over the KMT chairmanship after an election on July 26.
Senior officials accompanying Ma on his trip said Taiwan could not agree to flights routed directly across the Taiwan Strait because of national security concerns.
“China reserves 90 percent of its airspace for military training, while we only have the airspace on our side of the Taiwan Strait meridian,” said one official, adding that Taiwan could not afford to budge on this issue.
Noting that both Taiwan and the US are concerned about regional security in the Taiwan Strait, the official said steadiness was more important than speed in cross-strait development at this stage.
In Taipei, Democratic Progressive Party acting spokesman Chuang Suo-hang (莊碩漢) said if Taiwan opened the middle line of the Strait to China, Taiwan’s defense would collapse, adding that the proposal raised by Beijing was unthinkable.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY RICH CHANG AND CNA
A Ministry of Foreign Affairs official yesterday said that a delegation that visited China for an APEC meeting did not receive any kind of treatment that downgraded Taiwan’s sovereignty. Department of International Organizations Director-General Jonathan Sun (孫儉元) said that he and a group of ministry officials visited Shenzhen, China, to attend the APEC Informal Senior Officials’ Meeting last month. The trip went “smoothly and safely” for all Taiwanese delegates, as the Chinese side arranged the trip in accordance with long-standing practices, Sun said at the ministry’s weekly briefing. The Taiwanese group did not encounter any political suppression, he said. Sun made the remarks when
The Taiwanese passport ranked 33rd in a global listing of passports by convenience this month, rising three places from last month’s ranking, but matching its position in January last year. The Henley Passport Index, an international ranking of passports by the number of designations its holder can travel to without a visa, showed that the Taiwan passport enables holders to travel to 139 countries and territories without a visa. Singapore’s passport was ranked the most powerful with visa-free access to 192 destinations out of 227, according to the index published on Tuesday by UK-based migration investment consultancy firm Henley and Partners. Japan’s and
BROAD AGREEMENT: The two are nearing a trade deal to reduce Taiwan’s tariff to 15% and a commitment for TSMC to build five more fabs, a ‘New York Times’ report said Taiwan and the US have reached a broad consensus on a trade deal, the Executive Yuan’s Office of Trade Negotiations said yesterday, after a report said that Washington is set to reduce Taiwan’s tariff rate to 15 percent. The New York Times on Monday reported that the two nations are nearing a trade deal to reduce Taiwan’s tariff rate to 15 percent and commit Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) to building at least five more facilities in the US. “The agreement, which has been under negotiation for months, is being legally scrubbed and could be announced this month,” the paper said,
MIXED SOURCING: While Taiwan is expanding domestic production, it also sources munitions overseas, as some, like M855 rounds, are cheaper than locally made ones Taiwan and the US plan to jointly produce 155mm artillery shells, as the munition is in high demand due to the Ukraine-Russia war and should be useful in Taiwan’s self-defense, Armaments Bureau Director-General Lieutenant General Lin Wen-hsiang (林文祥) told lawmakers in Taipei yesterday. Lin was responding to questions about Taiwan’s partnership with allies in producing munitions at a meeting of the legislature’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee. Given the intense demand for 155mm artillery shells in Ukraine’s defense against the Russian invasion, and in light of Taiwan’s own defensive needs, Taipei and Washington plan to jointly produce 155mm shells, said Lin,
RSS