Former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) has said he may visit Japan later this year if his health permits, according to a press report yesterday.
"I will go this year if I am in good physical condition," Lee, 86, was quoted as saying by Japan's Jiji Press news agency in an interview.
Lee contracted tuberculosis last May and cancelled a visit to Japan scheduled for last September because he needed medical treatment at home.
PHOTO: CHEN MEI-NIEN, TAIPEI TIMES
In the interview, Lee praised a trip to Beijing made by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe after he took office in late September.
"Japan had kept kowtowing to China. But it needed to build a strategic relationship of trust and the visit to China by Prime Minister Abe was a success," Lee was quoted as saying.
Asked if Taiwan's independence was his ultimate goal, Lee answered: "I have never mentioned the independence of Taiwan. I have mentioned normalization of the state."
"Our goal is to have a name as a country with its own Constitution, and to join the United Nations as a member of the world," he said, according to Jiji Press. "I am taken as the leader of Taiwan's independence but it is not correct."
In April 2001, Lee made his first trip to Japan after stepping down as president. The visit, aimed at receiving medical treatment, prompted Beijing to cancel a visit to Japan by its then legislative chairman and former premier Li Peng (
Lee also made a sightseeing trip to Japan in 2004.
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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