Beijing would significantly curtail the possibility of cross-strait negotiations if it insists on a unification law with Taiwan, the Mainland Affairs Council said yesterday.
"China will encounter a certain degree of restriction and difficulty if it tries to place Taiwan policy within a legal framework. It would lose a great deal of flexibility," said council Chairman Chiu Tai-san (
Chiu's was responding to comments by Wang Zaixi (
"If China must produce such a law, it has to take into account the international community's expectations that cross-strait problems can be solved by peaceful means," Chiu said.
Beijing would face unexpected difficulties if it implemented the unification law, Chiu added.
Wang said that China had not set a 20-year timetable to unify Taiwan.
However, he warned that Bei-jing would not rule out war if President Chen Shui-bian (
"New tensions may arise and even a serious crisis in the cross-strait situation if Chen obstinately pursues his timetable," Wang said in a front-page interview with the China Daily published yesterday.
"We cannot completely rule out the possibility [of a military conflict] though it is not at all what we hope for," Wang said.
Wang added that the cross-strait political stalemate would continue during Chen's second term unless he accepted the "one China" principle.
"It would be hard for both sides to break the present political stalemate in the short term," he said.
"There will be no way for us to break the ice in political ties in the coming four years unless Chen returns to the one-China principle. What we can do is just work hard to prevent bilateral relations from deteriorating," he said.
Wang said that Taiwan's security depended on how Chen deals with the "one China" principle rather than whether he bought more aircraft and missiles from the US.
Chiu said that the council was monitoring Beijing's media, psychological and legal campaigns to bring about unification. A unification law would be part of the legal campaign, he added.
Chen, who has said on numerous occasions that constitutional reform would focus on the structure of government, said during a trip to the south of the nation on Thursday that China was attempting to lay a legal foundation for it to use force against the nation.
"Taiwan's status is defined as a `special administrative region' in Beijing's draft of the unification law. Is it right for Beijing to do this?" he asked.
"I am very concerned about the unification law ... Can our 23 million people remain unwary of this situation?" he asked.
Chen added that nearly 500,000 Hong Kong residents had taken to the street to protest against Article 23 of Hong Kong's Basic Law, an anti-subversion law, on July 1, 2003.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS