More than 1,000 Taiwanese-Americans converged on Washington Friday to attend a mass rally to protest China's "Anti-Secession" law, in an effort to raise the visibility in the US capitol of the worldwide movement against the law by expatriate Taiwanese.
Taiwanese-Americans from throughout the country were preparing to hold a rally yesterday in front of the Capitol Building, followed by a protest in front of the Chinese embassy a few miles away.
Taiwanese-Americans are "passionately opposed to the law," Bob In-yu Yang, the chief spokesman of the 17 groups of Taiwanese-Americans sponsoring the rally, said at a press conference Friday.
He called the rally an "expression of solidarity among Taiwanese-Americans against the Anti-Secession Law."
Rather than using the official Chinese title for the law, the groups have termed their activities a "Rally Against Chinese Annexation."
Eleven busloads of people arrived in Washington aboard charter buses, including two from Chicago, one from Michigan, two from Ohio, one from Boston, four from New Jersey and one from Atlanta, said Susan Chang, the president of the Taiwanese Association of America.
In addition, others came from Los Angeles, Houston, Tennessee and Iowa, she said.
Some 300 to 400 Washington-area Taiwanese-Americans will also join the rally, she said.
Non-Taiwanese have not been invited to the rally, Yang told the Taipei Times. The organizers had considered inviting Tibetans and Uighurs he said, but decided they wanted this to be a solely Taiwanese-American activity.
US congressmen will also be noticeably absent. The rally coincides with the Easter weekend, in which Congress is on recess and many other members of the Washington establishment are out of town visiting families for the seasonal school break.
In addition to Washington, similar rallies were scheduled for Saturday in New York City, Los Angeles, Seattle and Houston. Overseas, rallies were planned in Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Australia, Japan and Canada, in addition to Taipei.
"We strongly urge the United States and the international community to resolutely oppose China's `Anti-Secession Law,'" said a statement of the 326 Taiwanese-American Action Committee, which was to be read at the rally. "We further ask the United States and its democratic allies help create an environment in which the people of Taiwan will be able to exercise their right to self-determination."
"The future of Taiwan must be determined by the people of Taiwan," the statement added. Wu Ming-chi, the president of the Formosan Association for Public Affairs, Taiwan's main congressional lobbying group in Washington, said that both the House and the Senate "strongly oppose the so-called Anti-Secession Law."
He cited letters the leadership of the international relations committees of both chambers sent to Beijing officials in February urging them not to enact the law, the near-unanimous recent House resolution condemning the law, and statements by more than 30 congressmen on the floor of both chambers opposing the law.
Asked about the pan-blue camp's reservations about Taiwan's million-person march on Saturday, Yang said that "the numbers speak for themselves as to how the Taiwan people feel."
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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