Elaborating on the thinking behind his New Year address, President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) yesterday said he wanted to use the speech to clarify that only the nation's 23 million people can decide Taiwan's future.
"Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) told international media that `unification' is his party's ultimate goal," Chen said.
"But I think it is not democratic at all. That's why I stressed in my speech that the future of Taiwan will only be decided by the Taiwanese people," he said.
Chen made the remarks while meeting with a delegation of former US officials.
Chen explained to the visitors that his new mindset regarding cross-strait relations, known as "active management, effective opening," is intended to lower political risks associated with investing in China.
He said that Taiwan should not become overdependent on the China market because Beijing's ambition to annex Taiwan is growing, as is the number of ballistic missiles it has deployed against Taiwan.
The US delegation was led by former White House press secretary Joe Lockhart, an experienced political campaigner for several presidential candidates including Jimmy Carter and John Kerry.
Other delegates include former US ambassador to Portugal Gerald McGowan, president of the Washington Hospital Association Robert Malson, former White House press secretary Jake Siewert, former National Defense and Homeland Security spokesman P.J. Crowley and others.
Meanwhile, Chen revisited the controversy over the 2004 presidential election, and attributed his victory to the referendum that was held alongside the presidential vote.
Chen disagreed with people who attributed the Democratic Progressive Party's victory in the 2004 presidential election to the two bullets that grazed him and Vice President Annette Lu (
"I don't think so at all. The ruling party's being [re-elected] should be attributed to our knowing what Taiwan's core values are. The first national referendum held alongside the election, which promoted Taiwanese consciousness, was actually the key reason for the victory," Chen said.
The referendum asked voters whether Taiwan should strengthen its anti-missile defenses if China refuses to remove its missiles aimed at Taiwan, and whether the government should negotiate with Beijing for the establishment of a mechanism for dialogue to work for cross-strait peace.
During the meeting, Chen asked about the political situation in the US, including the possibility of a woman being elected US president in 2008.
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
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
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
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: