US President Barack Obama reportedly declared his “strong commitment” to the Three Joint Communiques and the Taiwan Relations Act during his White House summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平).
While details of discussions concerning Taiwan remain secret, Obama is understood to have firmly supported Taiwan.
A congressional source told the Taipei Times that Xi raised the subject and Obama responded.
Photo courtesy of Formosan Association for Public Affairs
The source did not know if Taiwan’s upcoming presidential elections were mentioned.
About 600 anti-China protesters — 60 of them Taiwanese waving placards and banners — could be heard clearly as they chanted slogans from a nearby park.
“I reiterated my strong commitment as well to our ‘one China’ policy based on the Three Joint Communiques and the Taiwan Relations Act,” Obama said on Friday at a joint press conference in the White House garden.
Xi did not mention Taiwan at the news conference.
The two leaders took few questions and none of them concerned Taiwan.
The major announcement to emerge from the news conference was that the US and China vowed to fight global warming and halt commercial cybertheft.
At the joint news conference, Obama chided China on its treatment of dissidents and insisted hacking attacks on US firms must stop, even as he thanked Xi for his commitment on climate change.
The world’s top two economic powers are also its biggest polluters, and campaigners hailed their commitment to reduce emissions as a key step toward a global climate pact before the end of the year.
Provocatively, Obama directly cited the name of Beijing’s number one bugbear — the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader seen by China as a criminal separatist — at the leaders’ joint news conference.
“Even as we recognize Tibet as part of the People’s Republic of China, we continue to encourage Chinese authorities to preserve the religious and cultural identity of the Tibetan people and to engage the Dalai Lama or his representatives,” Obama said.
The two delegations promised not to spy on each other’s private enterprises for commercial gain, but here again, Obama used tough language, declaring: “I indicated it has to stop.”
Xi said that “China strongly opposes and combats the theft of commercial secrets and other kinds of hacking attacks.”
The Chinese leader also firmly pushed back on human rights criticism, warning that reform would come on China’s own timetable and without undermining its stability.
“We must recognize that countries have different historical processes and realities, that we need to respect people of all countries in the rights to choose their own development path independently,” he said.
Against this background, the agreement on climate change — both countries signed a “joint vision” ahead of December’s UN climate summit in Paris, and China committed to a domestic “cap and trade” carbon exchange — was all the more notable.
China is also to set aside US$3.1 billion for a fund to help developing countries fight climate change.
“If the world’s two largest economies, energy consumers and carbon emitters come together like this, then there is no reason for other countries, whether developed or developing, to not do so as well,” Obama said.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon commended both countries for the “significant steps” they pledged to take on the climate.
“This announcement bolsters prospects for a universal, meaningful agreement in Paris this year,” the secretary-general’s spokesman said.
Shortly after the summit meetings closed, the US-Taiwan Business Council issued a statement signed by its president, Rupert Hammond-Chambers, that said “for the first time in a number of years,” Xi was worried about Taiwan.
It said the Democratic Progressive Party was likely to win the January presidential election and “this realization is causing growing panic among those vested in China’s vision of unification with Taiwan.”
The statement said that the US had slowed its engagement with Taiwan to a crawl and demonstrated a lack of will and intent to maintain peace and security in the Taiwan Strait.
Taipei’s underinvestment in Taiwan’s national defense has to end, Hammond-Chambers said.
“No US government can reasonably undertake support for new defensive capabilities if Taiwan takes its national defense less seriously than the US does,” the statement said.
‘ABUSE OF POWER’: Lee Chun-yi allegedly used a Control Yuan vehicle to transport his dog to a pet grooming salon and take his wife to restaurants, media reports said Control Yuan Secretary-General Lee Chun-yi (李俊俋) resigned on Sunday night, admitting that he had misused a government vehicle, as reported by the media. Control Yuan Vice President Lee Hung-chun (李鴻鈞) yesterday apologized to the public over the issue. The watchdog body would follow up on similar accusations made by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and would investigate the alleged misuse of government vehicles by three other Control Yuan members: Su Li-chiung (蘇麗瓊), Lin Yu-jung (林郁容) and Wang Jung-chang (王榮璋), Lee Hung-chun said. Lee Chun-yi in a statement apologized for using a Control Yuan vehicle to transport his dog to a
Taiwan yesterday denied Chinese allegations that its military was behind a cyberattack on a technology company in Guangzhou, after city authorities issued warrants for 20 suspects. The Guangzhou Municipal Public Security Bureau earlier yesterday issued warrants for 20 people it identified as members of the Information, Communications and Electronic Force Command (ICEFCOM). The bureau alleged they were behind a May 20 cyberattack targeting the backend system of a self-service facility at the company. “ICEFCOM, under Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party, directed the illegal attack,” the warrant says. The bureau placed a bounty of 10,000 yuan (US$1,392) on each of the 20 people named in
The High Court yesterday found a New Taipei City woman guilty of charges related to helping Beijing secure surrender agreements from military service members. Lee Huei-hsin (李慧馨) was sentenced to six years and eight months in prison for breaching the National Security Act (國家安全法), making illegal compacts with government employees and bribery, the court said. The verdict is final. Lee, the manager of a temple in the city’s Lujhou District (蘆洲), was accused of arranging for eight service members to make surrender pledges to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army in exchange for money, the court said. The pledges, which required them to provide identification
INDO-PACIFIC REGION: Royal Navy ships exercise the right of freedom of navigation, including in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea, the UK’s Tony Radakin told a summit Freedom of navigation in the Indo-Pacific region is as important as it is in the English Channel, British Chief of the Defence Staff Admiral Tony Radakin said at a summit in Singapore on Saturday. The remark came as the British Royal Navy’s flagship aircraft carrier, the HMS Prince of Wales, is on an eight-month deployment to the Indo-Pacific region as head of an international carrier strike group. “Upholding the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and with it, the principles of the freedom of navigation, in this part of the world matters to us just as it matters in the
RSS