The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday welcomed China’s reported offer to reposition its military forces opposite Taiwan.
“We welcome such a move whether it is a repositioning or removal. For us, they carry similar significance,” MAC Deputy Minister Chao Chien-min (趙健民) said in response to a Reuters report that US Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein on Wednesday said China had offered to reposition its military forces opposite Taiwan to ease cross-strait tensions.
Presidential Office Spokesman Lo Chih-chiang (羅智強) yesterday declined to comment, referring the press to the Ministry of National Defense and MAC.
While Chao yesterday said the council needed more information before making further comment, he said that it has been the policy of President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration to urge China to remove missiles deployed along its southeast coastline and renounce the use of military force against Taiwan.
It is also Ma administration policy to maintain Taiwan’s defense capability and protect peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, he said.
Chao said the weapons Taiwan purchased from the US were defensive in nature and were important for the country’s self-defense and preservation of regional peace. Therefore, it was unnecessary to draw a parallel between the arms procurement plan and China’s military redeployment, he said.
Chao said that Washington should not, and he believed would not, let cross-strait rapprochement affect future arms sales to Taiwan because the sales concern peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait and East Asia.
Meanwhile, at a separate setting yesterday, Ma said the former Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government had procrastinated over arms procurement plans over the past decade and that cross-strait detente has helped push the deals forward.
The then-DPP government’s budget proposal for a US arms procurement sale was held up for six years in the legislature by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) on the grounds the price tag was too high.
The sale was approved by the administration of former president George W. Bush in April 2001.
In 2008, Bush agreed to Taiwan’s arms request and this was followed by US President Barack Obama’s notification to Congress to sell more weapons to Taiwan in January this year, which Ma said indicated Taiwan has improved its relationship with the US over the past two years he has been in office, resulting in the restoration of mutual trust among senior officials.
“The requests were made more than a decade ago, but no progress was made,” he said when meeting Virginia Secretary of Commerce and Trade James Cheng (鄭叔霆) and his wife, former singer Jeanette Wang (王芷蕾), at the Presidential Office. “Finally, two US presidents gave them the go-ahead. Those weapons are very useful for our national defense.”
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