President Chen Shui-bian (
"The lesson we have learned over the past seven years is that China's fundamental position on the issue has not changed," Chen said.
"It does not recognize Taiwan as a sovereign state and it considers Taiwan as part of its territory, a local government, a special administrative region and a second Hong Kong," he said.
Chen was speaking during a meeting with a US delegation of experts on China led by David Lampton at the Presidential Office yesterday morning.
Lampton is director of Chinese studies at the Nixon Center as well as a professor of China studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.
Over the decades, China has made an all-out effort to denigrate, marginalize and localize Taiwan, Chen said.
It is crucial the administration insist that Taiwan is a sovereign country and has the courage to rebut China's claim of sovereignty over the nation, he said.
Chen said the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration firmly rejects the idea of "one China" and does not recognize the existence of a "1992 consensus" between Taiwan and China.
"When it comes to sovereignty, China will never give in unless Taiwan yields," he said. "But as president of Taiwan, how can I face its 23 million people and our ancestors if I abandon Taiwan's sovereignty?"
He said that China's oppression of Taiwan dated back to the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regime.
"No matter who is in power -- the pan-blue camp or the pan-green camp, the KMT or the DPP -- China's suppression has always been there," he said. "Almost everybody knows why Taiwan left the UN and why diplomatic ties with the United States were severed. The diplomatic setbacks did not happen during my presidency but during that of Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and his son Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國)."
KMT presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou (
"Although China is a threat to us in diplomatic and security terms, it offers great economic opportunities. Cross-strait affairs should be dealt with according to the issue at hand," Ma said after meeting with volunteers at his campaign office.
On Chen's call for presidential candidates to regard China with suspicion, Ma lashed out at the government for refusing to have any exchanges with Beijing while promising to resolve cross-strait problems.
"If the KMT has the chance to take back power, we will never repeat the errors that the government has committed, such as creating unnecessary cross-strait tension," Ma said.
Additional reporting by Mo Yan-chih
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,