Deputy Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs at the US State Department Thomas Christensen said in written testimony on Friday that the US would continue to put pressure on Beijing to reduce its military threat to Taiwan and to tell Beijing frankly that the US has a strong interest in a secure Taiwan.
Christensen provided the statement to the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which he could not attend because he was traveling abroad.
The letter was read on his behalf by John Norris, Director of the US State Department's Office of Chinese and Mongolian Affairs.
Christensen said the US was deeply concerned that China continued to position missiles and weapons systems aimed at Tai-wan and that the US took note that China had refused to give up the option of using military force against Taiwan.
The US would have to respond according to its duties laid out in the Taiwan Relations Act, he added.
He said that the US insisted that cross-strait differences be resolved peacefully with an agreement between the peoples of both China and Taiwan, adding that the US would continue to pressure Beijing to increase dialogue with Taiwan, including with its democratically elected leaders.
During a question-and-answer session, Norris revealed that after China shot down an old weather satellite, the US immediately contacted the Chinese government in Beijing and their representative in Washington.
He said he believed that strategically, this violated China's insistence that it doesn't intend to militarize space and that the US protested that the broken pieces could threaten satellites and astronauts.
The US was still unsatisfied with China's explanation and negotiations were ongoing, he added.
also see story:
US considers space collaboration with China after test
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
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
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