A political cartoon featuring APEC leaders at the upcoming informal leadership summit in Busan, South Korea, has triggered speculation that Academia Sinica President Lee Yuan-tseh (
However, an official from Lee's office at the Academia Sinica yesterday denied that Lee would attend the APEC summit this year. The official said the Nobel laureate will participate in an overseas academic conference starting tomorrow and lasting until Nov. 15, which would not give him enough time to prepare for the APEC meeting, which is scheduled for Nov. 18 and Nov. 19.
Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Michel Lu (
Lu said the ministry was still waiting for news from the Presidential Office on who the representative will be.
The cartoon was published yesterday by the Yonhap News Agency, which has been selected by the South Korean government to report on the APEC meeting.
In the cartoon, the head of Taiwan's top research institute and the Nobel laureate are among the heads of state of the APEC member nations in attendance.
Lee, who attended the last three informal APEC leadership summits on behalf of Chen, said earlier that he had no intention of attending this year's meeting.
Chen this year named Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) to go to Busan on his behalf. However, China has voiced vehement opposition, citing a memorandum of understanding signed before Taiwan joined the organization which states that Taiwan can only send a "minister in charge of APEC-related economic affairs" to attend APEC meetings.
Beijing has also said that since then, APEC "has operated on this basis."
Chen voiced regret on Tuesday over Beijing's rejection of Wang, but stressed that Taiwan would not be absent from the meeting.
Wang yesterday told reporters that he still hopes to attend the APEC meetings on behalf of Chen and is still working through various channels to secure his representation in South Korea.
Wang said he had met former South Korean president Kim Young-sam in the legislature yesterday. Wang said that Kim promised to lobby Seoul on the matter.
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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