Setting up Taiwan-friendly groups in a congress of countries that do not have official diplomatic ties with the nation is a way to prevent China from blocking Taiwan's international space, the chairman of the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC), Joseph Wu (吳釗燮), said yesterday.
Wu made the remarks while giving a speech to members of the Ketagalan Institute, an academy founded by President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) in 2003 to cultivate future leaders of the country.
"As the Chinese side continues exerting pressure to suppress Taiwan's international space, which degrades Taiwan's sovereign status and its symbols as a sovereign country, Taiwan should maintain solid friendships with diplomatic allies and establish relations with the congress of other democratic countries," Wu said.
The Chinese side has been trying to destroy the relations between Taiwan and its diplomatic allies and even intervene in Taiwan's interaction with non-allied countries by means of operating a "dollar diplomacy" policy, Wu said.
Wu said it is necessary for Taiwan to establish associations with countries who do not have official diplomatic ties with the nation. In that way, it can help countries to gain a better understanding about Taiwan and not be influenced by the propaganda launched by China, he said.
Touching on issues relating to cross-strait stability, Wu said that Beijing has separately exercised joint war games with countries such as Russia, the UK and Pakistan and so enhanced its military capability, which has been posing a serious threat to Taiwan.
Wu said that the council and the Ministry of Defense had tried hard to explain China's intentions and its military threat to Taiwan to countries such as Japan and the US as well as the EU after the passage of the Chinese "Anti-Secession" Law.
He said that in order to protect the safety of Taiwan, the nation needs to have sufficient self-defense capabilities.
"It is necessary for Taiwan to purchase self-defense weapons, but the budget [for this] has been strongly opposed by the opposition parties," he said.
Despite China's barriers to consultations and negotiations, Wu said that the government still insists on its principle of "goodwill, reconciliation, active cooperation and lasting peace" in dealing with Beijing.
Noting that there are potential threats inside China, such as the increasing gap between the rich and the poor, Wu said that the Chinese authorities may tighten controls on the media and may misuse nationalism.
As a result, internal conflicts in China may cause anti-Taiwanese sentiments there, bringing serious negative impacts to Taiwanese entrepreneurs at a time when they have made investments worth more than NT$100 billion (US$3 billion) in China, Wu 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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