China should make good on its recent goodwill gestures by taking concrete action, according to the Mainland Affairs Council Vice Chairman Chiu Tai-san (
"Aside from having good intentions, there needs to be action and moves toward resolving existing hindrances to improved cross-strait ties," Chiu said at a press conference yesterday.
Chiu was responding to inquiries regarding recent remarks that Beijing's Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait (ARATS) vice chairman and deputy director of the Taiwan Affairs Office Sun Yafu (
The media reported yesterday that Sun indicated that ARATS and its counterpart organization in Taiwan, the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF), would continue to maintain good relations through interaction, exchange, dialogue, and negotiation.
The recent visit to Taiwan of senior Chinese officials, including Sun and ARATS secretary-general Li Yafei (
Building on the recent easing of strained ties, the council also released yesterday a short video clip that will be aired in local movie theaters and on TV before and during the Lunar New Year holiday.
The clip features a driver who is impeded by a fallen tree on the road. As wind and rain knock the tree down, the driver gets out of his car to move it out of the way, when he receives unexpected assistance from a driver coming from the opposite direction. With the tree removed, the two drivers give each other a cheery high-five as they pass each other.
A press release accompanying the 30-second clip said that its purpose is to remind people that they can have "new expectations" about cross-strait relations in the new year, and that the government will do its best to stabilize the cross-strait situation.
Giving a more specific explanation of the clip's symbolism, Chiu said that Taiwan hopes Beijing will put off passage of its anti-secession law.
"It's counterproductive," he said.
Chiu gave vague answers yesterday when asked whether Chinese officials had met with the SEF to discuss the so-called "1992 Consensus," a point of contention between Taiwan and China.
"Sun's visit to Taiwan was arranged in light of the circumstances. The government respects that. There was a simple exchange of opinion during the visit," Chiu said, without elaborating.
China, and some in Taiwan, insist that a consensus was reached in semi-official talks in 1992, with both sides agreeing on the "one China" principle, while agreeing to disagree on what that meant. The Chen administration, however, denies that a "consensus" was ever reached.
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
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
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