Taipei City Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said yesterday that he would continue to push for cross-strait city exchanges, but added that the ties would not necessarily be in the form of sisterhood ties.
"Exchanges between cities across the Taiwan Strait do not necessarily have to be in the form of sisterhood relationships and not entering into such sisterhood ties does not mean that cities can't have any exchanges," Ma said yesterday.
Ma's remarks were in response to opposition KMT Vice Chairman Wu Poh-hsiung (吳伯雄) who said on Sunday in Xiamen, a port city in Fujian Province, that Ma earlier wanted to enter into a sisterhood relationship with Beijing, but that Chinese officials refused because Beijing is the capital. Wu added that Ma hoped to establish such ties with Shanghai and that authorities again refused on the basis that sisterhood ties should be a "country-to-country" matter.
Wu, who had been mayor of Taipei in the past and also had been the interior minister and Presidential Office secretary-general under the previous KMT government, is currently visiting China to attend a world Hakka amity meeting which opened in Xiamen yesterday. He is the highest-level KMT official to visit China.
Ma, however, denied Wu's comments, saying yesterday that the Taipei City Government has never taken the initiative to forge sisterhood relationships with cities in China, although "some" had actually made suggestions to that effect. Ma said that after Taipei Deputy Mayor Bai Hsiu-hsiung's (
In July, Kaohsiung Mayor Frank Hsieh (
The trip was rejected by the Mainland Affairs Council over what it said were "legal problems."
Taiwan's laws bar its officials from visiting China and China's officials from visiting Taiwan.
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