Beijing's plan to include Taiwan as a stop in the 2008 Olympic torch relay was never more than a political ploy, panelists attending a forum on the relay said yesterday.
The attempt was obvious because Taipei, as the Chinese Olympic Committee's official Web site showed, was excluded from the official list of cities that would host the relay -- even as Beijing said in a lavish ceremony on Thursday that Taipei would host a leg of the relay.
Printouts of the Web site provided by Taiwan Thinktank yesterday, dated Thursday 8:51pm -- a half hour after Beijing announced, amid fireworks and celebrations, that Taipei would be included in the relay -- showed the committee's official list of locales to host the relay. Taiwan was marked by its absence.
PHOTO: LIAO CHEN-TUNG, TAIPEI TIMES
"The torch would go directly from Vietnam to Hong Kong. Excuse me, where would Taipei fit in?" director of Soochow University's department of political science Lo Chi-cheng (羅致政) told the forum.
The committee's Web site yesterday, however, showed that Taipei had since been added to the route, right where Beijing has said it would be: between Vietnam and Hong Kong.
But as of yesterday, the site also included a link to an animated map tracing the torch's planned route across the world and identified Taiwan only as "China."
Titled "The Planned Olympic Torch Relay Route for the 2008 Beijing Olympics," the link, at http://zhuanti.sports.cn/huoju/1.html, labels 21 stops along the route, with names of cities.
The last, or 22nd, stop is Taiwan, but neither "Taiwan" nor "Taipei" appears on the animation. The stop is labeled merely "China," a title that remains, along with "Beijing" and "Athens," after other labels have faded out.
The route begins with Beijing and ends with the fading in of the Chinese characters for "China" superimposed on Taiwan.
The link to the map was displayed on the committee's Web site yesterday and also by the All-China Sports Federation on its site. The federation and committee identify themselves as being associated with each other.
Taiwan's Olympic committee rejected the route on the grounds that it belittles Taiwan by implying the country is part of China's domestic route.
The Government Information Office issued a release on Friday saying that in Olympics-related forums at the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Beijing has consistently called Taiwan "Taipei, China" rather than by its formal name "Chinese Taipei."
"It's obvious that China has a political agenda -- that it wants to make it seem like Taiwan is part of China," Mainland Affairs Committee Vice Chairman Tung Chen-yuan (童振源) said at the forum, adding that the IOC was complicit in pursuing that agenda.
References to Taiwan were all changed from "Taipei, China" to "Chinese Taipei" on the IOC's Web site as controversy over the proposed route broke out, Tung said.
Beijing and the Olympic committee further broke Olympic protocol by not getting Taiwan's permission before announcing the route on TV, he added.
International and Chinese Olympic committee members made the televised announcement together.
Beijing later slammed Taipei for reneging on what it said was an agreement on the announced route.
Taipei shot back that it had not agreed to China's calling Taiwan "Taipei, China" and spreading propaganda saying "Taiwan would be the torch's first stop in China."
Lo said Beijing's deciding on North Korea and Vietnam as stops preceding Taiwan was also no accident: by arranging for the torch to pass through communist countries before reaching Taiwan, China was pegging Taiwan as falling under its sphere of influence.
"It's also easier for Beijing to control the situation with its communist allies preceding Taiwan, followed by Hong Kong," he said.
"Any problems would be much harder to troubleshoot if we were sandwiched between Japan and South Korea," he said.
Emotions at the forum boiled over when political columnist Paul Lin (林保華) slammed the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) -- whose former chairman, Lien Chan (連戰), was shown on television consorting with Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) yesterday -- for its criticism of the Taiwanese government's rejection of the Olympic torch's route.
Lien and Hu began a cross-strait trade-enhancement forum between the KMT and Chinese Communist Party in Beijing yesterday.
KMT politicians had billed the relay as an opportunity to garner international attention and have demanded a separation of politics from sports.
"Taiwan could forgive those who would swindle it once or twice!" Lin screamed. "But for those who insist on singing the communists' unification song -- they are the commies' running dogs, the commies' slaves!"
"They are Taiwan's treasonous lot -- our nation's betrayers!" Lin added.
The military has spotted two Chinese warships operating in waters near Penghu County in the Taiwan Strait and sent its own naval and air forces to monitor the vessels, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) said. Beijing sends warships and warplanes into the waters and skies around Taiwan on an almost daily basis, drawing condemnation from Taipei. While the ministry offers daily updates on the locations of Chinese military aircraft, it only rarely gives details of where Chinese warships are operating, generally only when it detects aircraft carriers, as happened last week. A Chinese destroyer and a frigate entered waters to the southwest
A magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck off the coast of Yilan County at 8:39pm tonight, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said, with no immediate reports of damage or injuries. The epicenter was 38.7km east-northeast of Yilan County Hall at a focal depth of 98.3km, the CWA’s Seismological Center said. The quake’s maximum intensity, which gauges the actual physical effect of a seismic event, was a level 4 on Taiwan’s 7-tier intensity scale, the center said. That intensity level was recorded in Yilan County’s Nanao Township (南澳), Hsinchu County’s Guansi Township (關西), Nantou County’s Hehuanshan (合歡山) and Hualien County’s Yanliao (鹽寮). An intensity of 3 was
Instead of focusing solely on the threat of a full-scale military invasion, the US and its allies must prepare for a potential Chinese “quarantine” of Taiwan enforced through customs inspections, Stanford University Hoover fellow Eyck Freymann said in a Foreign Affairs article published on Wednesday. China could use various “gray zone” tactics in “reconfiguring the regional and ultimately the global economic order without a war,” said Freymann, who is also a nonresident research fellow at the US Naval War College. China might seize control of Taiwan’s links to the outside world by requiring all flights and ships entering or leaving Taiwan
The next minimum wage hike is expected to exceed NT$30,000, President William Lai (賴清德) said yesterday during an award ceremony honoring “model workers,” including migrant workers, at the Presidential Office ahead of Workers’ Day today. Lai said he wished to thank the awardees on behalf of the nation and extend his most sincere respect for their hard work, on which Taiwan’s prosperity has been built. Lai specifically thanked 10 migrant workers selected for the award, saying that although they left their home countries to further their own goals, their efforts have benefited Taiwan as well. The nation’s industrial sector and small businesses lay
RSS