It's unlikely that the EU will lift its arms-sale embargo against China this year, while it's also hard to predict how long the EU will persist in the ban, the nation's representative to the EU's headquarters in Belgium, Chen Chien-jen (程建人) said yesterday.
Chen made the remarks while reporting on relations between Taiwan and the EU in a meeting of the Foreign and Overseas Chinese Affairs Committee in the Legislative Yuan.
"As the UK now holds the presidency of the EU from July to December 2005, we don't think that the EU will remove the ban during this period. But I am not sure whether the ban will continue when the rotating presidency goes to Austria and Finland next year," Chen said.
"The EU's arms embargo won't last for 100 years. I think that the government has prepared how to respond to the situation when the ban is removed," he said.
Chen said that the factors influencing the EU's determination to lift the ban include pressure from the US, Taiwan's objections and the human rights situation in China.
"We will also do our best to persuade the EU not to end its ban," he said.
Chen said that China and the EU have already turned their relations into a "comprehensive strategic partnership."
"The strategic partnership between China and the EU is based on their intentions to seize the huge business opportunities from each other and to balance the monopoly of power of the US. We have to face this tendency," he said.
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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