President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) expressed hope during an interview with a Japanese television channel that aired yesterday that Japan and Taiwan could enter a military partnership to help bolster security in East Asia.
In the interview with Fuji TV Channel 8, Chen said that Taiwan-Japan relations were the best in three decades. He said that although Taiwan maintains no formal diplomatic relations with Japan, it hoped to forge a "military partnership" with Japan for mutually beneficial security arrangements.
During the interview conducted in Palau on Tuesday when he was visiting the South Pacific island country, Chen said that China had never forsworn its plans to conquer Taiwan militarily.
Chen said that when he was first elected president in 2000, China was known to have deployed 200 ballistic missiles targeting Taiwan. By this year, he added, the number of missiles had increased to 820 as China had increased its deployment by 100 to 120 missiles every year.
He quoted intelligence information as indicating that China might plan for an invasion of Taiwan in three stages: Preparing itself to be capable of responding any time to a war with Taiwan by next year; readying itself for launching massive and comprehensive assaults against Taiwan by 2010 and making itself capable of taking Taiwan once and for all by 2015.
Chen expressed his appreciation for the move by Japan and the US in a security meeting held in February last year to include a peaceful solution to the Taiwan Strait conflict as one of their joint strategic goals in the Asia-Pacific region.
Chen said that although Japan and Taiwan maintained no formal diplomatic ties, the two countries' forging of a military partnership would be a shot in the arm to efforts to boost regional security.
On concerns that China has been working to split and disintegrate Taiwan from within, Chen said that Beijing does not recognize Taiwan as a sovereign state and has refused to talk with Taiwan's popularly elected government. Instead, he said, Beijing has talked only to the nation's opposition parties.
Chen said that it was regrettable that some Taiwanese opposition parties had been used by China.
Meanwhile, Chen said that he has consistently admired Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, particularly for his guts in saying "no" to Beijing. He said that he would extend his most hearty invitation to Koizumi to visit Taiwan when the prime minister retires later this year, so that Koizumi could attend a ceremony marking the inauguration of Taiwan's high-speed railway, which uses Japan's Shinkansen bullet train system.
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
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:
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
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