Home is "the place where family bones lie," Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou (
The former KMT chairman was born in Hong Kong in 1950 to parents who were post-war immigrants from China.
His father is buried in Taipei.
Talking about the idea of "Taiwan identity," Ma cited a speech titled "Who are the French?" made by French President Nicolas Sarkozy during his presidential election campaign earlier in this year.
In his speech, Sarkozy said that "What makes us French is not only that we were born in France but also that we choose to stay in France."
Sarkozy is the son of a Hungarian immigrant father and his mother is the daughter of a Greek immigrant.
Sarkozy's family "was not born in France but decided to stay in that country because they love France and the people who live there," Ma said.
"They are French people because they chose to fight alongside people living in that land for a better life," Ma said.
"Why can't we do as the French?" Ma asked, in reference to longstanding disagreements between weishengren (外省人) -- people who immigrated from China near the end of the Civil War, along with their descendants -- and the benshengren (本省人), who came to Taiwan from China hundreds of years ago.
The Republic of China government has existed in Taiwan for 57 years since its relocation by the KMT administration in 1949, Ma said, citing a local poet who wrote: "Homeland is where a man has stayed for long."
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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