The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) yesterday said Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Lien Chan (
DPP Deputy Secretary-General Lee Ying-yuan (李應元) said judging by the KMT's previous failures in the seven negotiations with the Chinese Communist Party during China's civil war in the 1940s, which resulted in them losing control over China, the arms control talks could mean losing Taiwan.
"In the negotiations between the KMT and the Chinese Communist Party, the KMT failed severely and finally lost the territory of China to the communist party. We don't want to see the eighth negotiation, which might cause irreversible results to Taiwan," Lee said, adding that Lien had expressed high expectations for the new Chinese leadership in an interview with The New York Times on Dec. 5.
Chen Chung-hsin (陳忠信), director of the DPP's Chinese Affairs Department, said Lien's proposal was "impossible" and "unattainable."
"Unless Taiwan gives up its sovereignty, the country would never be in a position to ask for such arms control negotiations with China, because Taiwan's military capabilities would never be comparable to China's," Chen said.
China's military capabilities are far superior to those of Taiwan, Chen said.
"Although the quality of Taiwan's weaponry is sound, the size of our armed forces can never compare with China's. China possesses a lot of weapons of mass destruction which could destroy Taiwan, but Taiwan does not possess enough offensive weapons to counter China's aggressive threats," he said.
According to Chen, China has constantly demanded that the US stop its arms sales to Taiwan, and therefore Taiwan has had to spend many years in negotiations with the US over the purchase of Kidd-class destroyers and submarines.
Chen said the arms control talks between the US and Russia during the Cold War, which Lien has proposed as a model for similar talks with China, had been conducted between two countries with equal military capabilities and that both sides were capable of destroying each other.
"China's renunciation of the use of force against Taiwan would depend solely on China's goodwill. We have asked China to sit down for talks regarding the cross-strait cargo links, but China never responded. I don't see any possibility that China would be willing to talk about military reduction," Chen said.
He said the only way to pressure China into renouncing force against Taiwan is to hold a "defensive referendum" to demonstrate the will of Taiwan's 23 million people.
"Although China might not respond to the results of the referendum, that's how international politics works," Chen said.
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