Academics yesterday called on the government to invite the Dalai Lama, Nobel Peace Prize laurete Liu Xiaobo’s (劉曉波) widow, Liu Xia (劉霞), and World Uyghur Congress president Rebiya Kadeer to Taiwan, as pressure from Beijing is bound to continue regardless.
China has over the past year snatched away diplomatic allies, contrived to terminate Taichung’s right to host the East Asian Youth Games, and demanded that foreign airlines and businesses change how they refer to Taiwan.
Most recently, bakery chain 85°C (85度C) was pressured to show its support for Beijing after President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) visited a Los Angeles branch on Sunday last week.
The government should not worry about what Beijing thinks, because even if it backs off or swallows its anger, China’s suppressive actions have come one after another and it appears that they will not be stopping, said Lin Wen-cheng (林文程), a professor at National Sun Yat-sen University’s Institute of China and Asia-Pacific Studies.
Taipei should not continue to care when it will be blamed no matter what it does, and will not be able to accomplish anything, Lin said.
The Dalai Lama is a religious leader who is respected around the world, Lin said, adding that Liu Xiaobo made a significant contribution to democracy, even sacrificing his life at the hand of Chinese persecution.
Inviting the Dalai Lama and Liu Xia to Taiwan would make sense, and the international community would approve and understand, Lin said, adding that doing so would not be interpreted as a challenge to Beijing, or an act of resistance.
Since Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) took office, his control over speech and activities defending human rights has been stricter than during the regimes of former Chinese presidents Jiang Zemin (江澤民) and Hu Jintao (胡錦濤), Chung Hua University professor of public administration Tseng Chien-yuan (曾建元) said.
Inviting people who have been oppressed by China to visit Taiwan would highlight how much the nation values freedom and human rights, Tseng said.
The government should take the initiative and welcome these people, easing their entry into Taiwan and making a statement to China, he said.
“Subtle methods” over the past two years have prevented the Dalai Lama and Kadeer from entering Taiwan, demonstrating that the nation has been intimidated by Beijing, Taiwan Association for Human Rights secretary-general Chiu Ee-ling (邱伊翎) said.
Asked whether the Dalai Lama would stop in Taiwan on his trip to Japan in November, Dawa Tsering, chairman of the Tibet Religious Foundation of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, said that it is not that the Dalai Lama does not want to come to Taiwan, but that he cannot come.
Many organizations have invited the Dalai Lama to visit Taiwan, but it depends on what would be “a convenient time for the Taiwanese government,” Dawa Tsering 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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