The leadership of the US Congress paid tribute on Tuesday to Chen Chien-jen (程建人), who has spent 20 of the past 37 years in the US developing the ties and friendships of the powerful lawmakers who came to see him off.
Chen is expected to leave Washington later this month after four years as head of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office, in advance of the arrival of his successor, David Lee (李大維), who is expected to arrive next month after the US government gives official sanction to his appointment.
Nearly two dozen leading members of Congress gathered in an ornate reception room in the Capitol building to laud Chen as a friend and a superb diplomat who has been on the firing line of US-Taiwan relations these past four years.
They took time out to honor Chen despite solemn proceedings next door as the Congress commemorated the death of former president Ronald Reagan, who presided over one of the most turbulent times in US-Taiwan relations.
Senate majority leader William Frist and minority leader Tom Daschle, along with House majority leader Tom DeLay and minority leader Nancy Pelosi hosted the event, which also attracted such former lawmakers as former Senate leader Bob Dole, a long-time lobbyist for Taiwan and Lester Wolff, one of the authors of the Taiwan Relations Act.
While Frist and DeLay were too busy with Reagan preparations, Daschle and Pelosi praised Chen's friendship and skills at making Taiwan's needs and desires felt on Capitol Hill.
Meanwhile, Chen was memorialized on the floor of the House by Representative Dan Burton, a long-time backer of Taiwan, who inserted a tribute to Chen in the official Congressional Record.
"The Republic of China has been one of our most important and loyal allies in the world, and Ambassador Chen has worked diligently to strengthen the ties that bind our two great nations," Burton said.
Today, he added, "Taiwan and the United States are friends and partners, not merely allies, and I think that in large measure is due to the tireless efforts of Ambassador Chen," Burton said.
Burton also let on that Chen's wife, Yolanda Ho, designed the wedding gown for Linda Hall Daschle, when she married Daschle, the current Senate Democratic leader. Daschle led off a string of oratorical paeans to Chen at the reception.
"I've worked with a lot of ambassadors over the years. I have never worked with one finer than C.J. Chen. For the leadership on both sides of the aisle [Democrats and Republicans] to say with the kind of enthusiasm and level of feeling that we have for this man says volumes about the man he is and the job he's done," Daschle said.
Representative Jim Leach, the chairman of the East Asia subcommittee of the House International Relations Committee, who led the US delegation to President Chen Shui-bian's (陳水扁) inaugural last month, noted that in the recent sensitive time in US-Taiwan relations, "nothing could be more important than to have a professional of C.J.'s quality and a decent individual of C.J.'s character. I don't know anyone who has more friends in the diplomatic world in Washington than C.J."
Tom Lantos, the top Democrat on the International Relations Committee and chairman of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, called Chen "one of Washington's most outstanding diplomats, who has done so much over the years in building US-Taiwan relations."
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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