Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) presidential candidate Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) yesterday welcomed his Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) counterpart's statement that "Taiwan is the Republic of China [ROC]."
Hsieh was speaking about a statement released by Ma Ying-jeou's (馬英九) campaign office late on Saturday night.
"We hope the DPP will not collude with China in attacking the Republic of China," Ma's statement read. "The Republic of China and Taiwan have now become inseparable. Taiwan is the Republic of China, harming the Republic of China means harming Taiwan."
Hsieh called on Ma to follow in the DPP's footsteps regarding its discourse on the issue of the nation's sovereignty.
DPP Chairman Yu Shyi-kun, on the other hand, panned Ma for being a plagiarist.
Yu said the DPP had already proposed such a discourse eight years ago in its "Taiwan Future Resolution."
FLIP-FLOP
Criticizing Ma for continually changing his stance on the issue, Yu said voters should not take this latest statement too seriously.
In response, Ma said yesterday he was not following in the DPP's footsteps because he and Hsieh had different views.
"He [Hsieh] is running for president of the Republic of Taiwan and I am running for president of the Republic of China," Ma said.
Executive Yuan Secretary-General Chen Ching-chun (陳景峻) yesterday demanded that Ma clarify whether his version of the ROC's territory included China.
"Is he saying that Taiwan is the ROC and China is part of the ROC? That would suggest Taiwan is part of China," Chen said.
Ma's statement suggests he does not identify with Taiwan, Chen said.
CONTRADICTION
Ma's latest statement appeared to contradict remarks made by the KMT's representative to the Cabinet's Referendum Review Committee.
Minutes of a committee meeting showed KMT representative to the committee, Liao Feng-de (廖風德), saying the country could only return to the UN as the ROC.
Liao made the statement in the committee's sixth meeting, saying that since the country once participated in the UN under the ROC name, it must return to the UN as the ROC. If it were to apply for membership using any other name, the move would not be a return to the UN but a new application by a new member, Liao was quoted as saying in the minutes.
The KMT's version of a referendum asks: "Do you agree this country should apply to return to the UN and other international organizations with a practical and flexible strategy, that is, do you approve using the name ROC, or Taiwan, or other names conducive both to the success of the mission and to maintaining dignity?"
The committee, which in June turned down the DPP's proposal for a referendum on the nation's application to join the UN using the name "Taiwan," gave the go-ahead to the KMT's proposal late last month.
TWO REFERENDUMS
The committee's approval means that there will now possibly be two referendums on securing a UN seat, should both parties complete the second stage of their signature collection drives, in which they need to collect more than 825,359 signatures supporting their version of the referendum.
The review committee, composed of members recommended by political parties in proportion to the number of legislative seats, originally had 21 members, but the eight DPP representatives resigned en masse following the rejection of the DPP's proposed referendum.
The DPP started its second-stage signature drive earlier this month after the Cabinet's Appeal Committee overruled the Referendum Review Committee's rejection.
Additional reporting by Shih Hsiu-chuan
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS