The Presidential Office drew sharp criticism from the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) after it removed the Chinese characters for “Taiwan” from its Web site, but left the word “Taiwan” in the English version.
DPP legislative whip William Lai (賴清德) said on Wednesday the office owed the public an explanation regarding whether President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration would follow up the removal of the characters with any similar moves.
He said he would like to know whether the administration would do the same to all government agencies whose name contains the name “Taiwan.”
Lai said Ma’s inaugural speech, titled “People rise up, Taiwan reborn,” gave people the impression that Ma would engage in localization.
However, the Presidential Office removed “Taiwan” from its Chinese Web site before Ma had even finished his inaugural address, Lai said.
“How do they expect the people to rise up if there is no Taiwan?” he asked.
Lai said his caucus was even more worried that the English word “Taiwan” printed in parenthesis on the cover of the Republic of China passport would suffer the same fate.
Presidential Office Spokesman Wang Yu-chi (王郁琦) said the reason the Chinese characters had been removed while the English wording was kept was that the international community tended to be more confused about the nation’s title, while Taiwanese were not.
It was not the first time they have adopted the approach, he said, adding that the same style had been used for the commemorative stamps for Ma’s inauguration.
Ma’s office had suggested postponing the launch of the stamps because the original design was controversial, using only the name “Taiwan” rather than the official national title, the Republic of China.
They later agreed to accept a new design bearing the wording “Republic of China (Taiwan),” a solution proposed by the state-run Taiwan Post Co to resolve the dispute of how the nation’s name should appear.
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
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s comment last year on Tokyo’s potential reaction to a Taiwan-China conflict has forced Beijing to rewrite its invasion plans, a retired Japanese general said. Takaichi told the Diet on Nov. 7 last year that a Chinese naval blockade or military attack on Taiwan could constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan, potentially allowing Tokyo to exercise its right to collective self-defense. Former Japan Ground Self-Defense Force general Kiyofumi Ogawa said in a recent speech that the remark has been interpreted as meaning Japan could intervene in the early stages of a Taiwan Strait conflict, undermining China’s previous assumptions
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
RSS