Minister of Foreign Affairs Eugene Chien (簡又新) yesterday denied Chinese Vice President Hu Jintao's (胡錦濤) comments that there was "increasing" support in Taiwan for reunification with China.
Citing polls conducted by the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) in recent years, Chien said Hu's closely watched speech in Washington simply misjudged public opinion in Taiwan on future Taipei-Beijing relations.
"Support [among respondents in MAC polls] for reunification was low, and support for `one country, two systems' was even lower. So there is a huge disparity between what he said and the MAC polls," Chien said.
Chien, who returned to Taipei on Wednesday evening after his trip to Nicaragua, El Salvador and Honduras, commented on Hu's trip to the US when meeting the press yesterday afternoon.
MAC surveys have shown that less than 10 percent of respondents backed Chinese rule of Taiwan under the "one country, two systems" model, while the majority of respondents favored maintaining the status quo.
Chien also said that the public remarks made by Hu, the apparent successor to Chinese President Jiang Zemin (江澤民), "lacked anything novel that went beyond our expectations."
"Hu's trip, as we've understood it, is simply a `introduction' journey," Chien said. "Nothing that he has said so far has caused any damage to Taiwan."
During his talk in Washington Wednesday evening, Hu was asked how the people of Taiwan could be convinced that unification with China was in their interests when polls showed that public opinion in Taipei "overwhelmingly" favored main-taining the status quo in cross-strait ties. Hu said that even though the majority favored maintaining the status quo, "I also know that, according to the polls in Taiwan, there are actually an increasing number of people in Taiwan who advocate reunification with the mainland."
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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