Two senior officials from the Beijing-based Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait (ARATS) will travel to Taipei tomorrow to pay their respects to Koo Chen-fu (辜振甫), the late Taiwanese negotiator with China, a Chinese official said yesterday.
Chen Yunlin (陳雲林), director of the Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) of China's State Council, said his deputy, Sun Yafu (孫亞夫), who is also the ARATS vice chairman, as well as ARATS Secretary-General Li Yafei (李亞飛), will pay tribute to the late chairman Koo, formerly of the Taipei-based Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF), on behalf of ARATS Chairman Wang Daohan (汪道涵).
Chen said the trip is not only aimed at expressing China's esteem for Koo's contributions to the promotion of cross-strait relations but also at symbolizing Beijing's respect for the people of Taiwan.
"We hope Sun and Li will convey our remembrance and condolences during their trip to Taipei," Chen said.
Koo, a respected businessman known for his diplomatic frankness, held a groundbreaking meeting with Wang in Singapore in 1993 in the first formal cross-strait contact in more than four decades. He died on Jan. 3 at the age of 88.
The historical Koo-Wang meeting laid the framework for the quasi-official SEF and ARATS to handle cross-strait exchanges in the absence of official ties. In 1998, the two envoys met again when Koo traveled to Shanghai and Beijing to boost further rapprochement.
However, Beijing unilaterally suspended regular SEF-ARATS dialogue in July 1999, when former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) defined cross-strait ties as a state-to-state relationship.
Wang sent his condolences to Koo's family immediately after learning of his death by issuing a press statement through Beijing's official Xinhua news agency.
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
INCREASED CAPACITY: The flights on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays would leave Singapore in the morning and Taipei in the afternoon Singapore Airlines is adding four supplementary flights to Taipei per week until May to meet increased tourist and business travel demand, the carrier said on Friday. The addition would raise the number of weekly flights it operates to Taipei to 18, Singapore Airlines Taiwan general manager Timothy Ouyang (歐陽漢源) said. The airline has recorded a steady rise in tourist and business travel to and from Taipei, and aims to provide more flexible travel arrangements for passengers, said Ouyang, who assumed the post in July last year. From now until Saturday next week, four additional flights would depart from Singapore on Monday, Wednesday, Friday
WATCH FOR HITCHHIKERS: The CDC warned those returning home from Japan to be alert for any contagious diseases that might have come back with them People who have returned from Japan following the World Baseball Classic (WBC) games during the weekend are recommended to watch for symptoms of infectious gastroenteritis, flu and measles for two weeks, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said. Flu viruses remain the most common respiratory pathogen in Taiwan in the past four weeks and the influenza B virus accounted for 55.7 percent of the tested cases, exceeding the percentage of influenza A (H3N2) infections and becoming the local dominant strain, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said at a news conference on Tuesday. There were 82,187 hospital visits for
Alumni from Japan’s Kyoto Tachibana Senior High School marching band, widely known as the “Orange Devils,” staged a flash mob performance at the Grand Hotel in Taipei yesterday to thank Taiwan for its support after the Great East Japan Earthquake. The show, performed on the earthquake’s 15th anniversary, drew more than 100 spectators, some of whom arrived two hours before the show to secure a good viewing spot. The 26-member group played selections from “High School Musical,” “Beauty and the Beast,” and their signature piece “Sing Sing Sing” and shouted “I love
RSS