Protests by China over the presence of nongovernment groups from Taiwan stalled for hours an Asian regional meeting Tuesday to prepare for a UN-sponsored summit on Internet technology.
Talks were delayed for five hours and resumed in the afternoon after a backroom compromise reached between the Japanese organizers and the delegates from China, who said Taiwanese participation was an affront to its "one-China policy."
The point was driven home during the morning, when a Chinese Foreign Ministry official repeatedly banged the table with the nameplate sign for his nation, demanding all talks stop.
"We are talking about Taiwan participation in the name of NGO," said the official, Ke Yousheng. "We are surely against this."
Several hours later, the Japanese chairman of the conference announced that Taiwanese nongovernment organizations or NGOs were no longer taking part in the conference.
"There are no NGOs from Taiwan participating in this conference," Vice-Minister Yoshio Tsukio said without elaborating.
A senior Japanese government official confirmed on the condition of anonymity that China agreed not to kick out the Taiwanese groups on condition they were listed under a Japanese nonprofit organization. A new list of participants was being made, he said.
The three-day meeting at a Tokyo hotel has drawn 37 nations as well as businesses, international organizations and nearly 200 nongovernment groups.
The conference, set to close today, has been trying to hammer out a regional agreement to submit to the World Summit on the Information Society, planned for December in Geneva.
A draft of a Tokyo Declaration distributed to participants calls for affordable and egalitarian access to Internet technology, preservation of cultural diversity in network content, training experts in the region and working toward open and flexible standards.
The declaration is set to be adopted before the meeting ends today. Work on fine-tuning the declaration was moved to a separate room while the compromise was being reached, but other statements from participants were put on hold.
Nongovernment groups issued a statement criticizing attempts to exclude them and stressed the importance of grass-roots views.
Anthony Carlisle, a member of the Asia-Pacific Public Affairs Forum, a Taiwan NGO-networking organization, said the participation of Taiwan groups made sense because the region is relatively advanced in cyber-technology.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching