Taiwan will send a vice foreign minister to Haitian president-elect Rene Preval's inauguration tomorrow after China blocked Premier Su Tseng-chang (
"Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Huang Long-yuan (
"He will call on Haiti's interim President Boniface Alexandre and the new president Preval and attend Preval's inauguration," the statement said.
Haiti is one of 25 nations that have diplomatic ties with Taiwan.
Haiti originally invited Chen to attend Preval's inauguration, but Chen decided to send Su as his envoy since he had to attend the inauguration of Costa Rican President Oscar Arias on Monday.
Two weeks ago, however, Preval told Taipei that it should send a lower-level official because of Chinese pressure.
The Chinese had threatened to veto an extension of the UN peacekeeping force's mandate in Haiti at the UN Security Council's session in August if Su attended, Preval said.
Taiwan has protested China's threat, but said it would send a lower-level official in order not to embarrass Haiti.
The government has called this incident its biggest diplomatic setback because it is the first time China had persuaded a diplomatic ally of Taiwan to deny entry to a Taiwanese leader.
Haiti has been in turmoil since 2004 when former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide was ousted. Since then, UN troops have been maintaining order in the destitute Carribean country.
In recent years, Beijing has stepped up its efforts to woo Taiwan's diplomatic allies into switching sides as well as blocking Taiwanese leaders from appearing on the world stage.
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
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater