Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to raise the issue of Taiwan in his talks with US President Barack Obama next week, the Chinese government said yesterday.
Xi’s visit comes just months before Taiwan’s presidential election in January, in which the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is expected to be thrashed by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).
China has been stepping up its rhetoric against the DPP as the vote nears.
“The Taiwan issue is the most important, most sensitive issue in Sino-US relations,” Ma Xiaoguang (馬曉光), spokesman for China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, told a regular briefing in Beijing after being asked if Taiwan would feature on the Xi-Obama agenda.
“We believe that, when the leaders of China and the United States meet, they will exchange views on important issues of mutual concern,” Ma said, without elaborating.
Beijing was alarmed in June when the DPP Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), the party’s presidential candidate, visited Washington to rally support from US officials and politicians.
Tsai has said she favors “maintaining the ‘status quo’” when asked about her China policy.
Ma said mainstream public opinion in Taiwan wanted to continue with developing good relations with China.
“We believe that only by upholding ... opposition to ‘Taiwan independence’ can the path to the peaceful development of cross-strait ties be maintained and broadened,” he said.
The nation’s fastest supercomputer, Nano 4 (晶創26), is scheduled to be launched in the third quarter, and would be used to train large language models in finance and national defense sectors, the National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) said. The supercomputer, which would operate at about 86.05 petaflops, is being tested at a new cloud computing center in the Southern Taiwan Science Park in Tainan. The exterior of the server cabinet features chip circuitry patterns overlaid with a map of Taiwan, highlighting the nation’s central position in the semiconductor industry. The center also houses Taiwania 2, Taiwania 3, Forerunner 1 and
FIRST TRIAL: Ko’s lawyers sought reduced bail and other concessions, as did other defendants, but the bail judge denied their requests, citing the severity of the sentences Former Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) was yesterday sentenced to 17 years in prison and had his civil rights suspended for six years over corruption, embezzlement and other charges. Taipei prosecutors in December last year asked the Taipei District Court for a combined 28-year, six-month sentence for the four cases against Ko, who founded the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP). The cases were linked to the Core Pacific City (京華城購物中心) redevelopment project and the mismanagement of political donations. Other defendants convicted on separate charges included Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei City Councilor Angela Ying (應曉薇), who was handed a 15-year, six-month sentence; Core Pacific
J-6 REMODEL: The converted drones are part of Beijing’s expanding mix of airpower weapons, including bombers with stand-off missiles and UAV swarms, the report said China has stationed obsolete supersonic fighters converted to attack drones at six air bases close to the Taiwan Strait, a report published this month by the Arlington, Virginia-based Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies said. Satellite imagery of the airfields from the institute’s “China Airpower Tracker” shows what appear to be lines of stubby, swept-winged aircraft matching the shape of J-6 fighters that first flew with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force in the 1960s. Since their conversion to drones, the aircraft have been identified at five bases in China’s Fujian Province and one in Guangdong Province, the report said. J.
China used fake LinkedIn profiles to harvest sensitive data from NATO and EU institutions by soliciting information from staff, a European security source said on Friday. The operation, allegedly orchestrated by the Chinese Ministry of State Security, targeted dozens of employees at the military alliance or EU organizations through fictitious accounts, the source said, confirming reports in French and Belgian media. Posing as recruiters on the online professional networking platform, Chinese spies would initially request paid reports before later soliciting non-public or even classified information. One particularly active fake profile used the name “Kevin Zhang,” claiming to be the head
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