DPP legislators yesterday criticized Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Wu Poh-hsiung (吳伯雄) after he said he felt it was unlikely that Beijing would launch a missile attack against Taiwan.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) caucus whip Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘) said Wu’s remarks could only further numb the public, making people less vigilant, and that the comments posed a danger to national security.
Ker said China’s attitude toward Taiwan has always been hypocritical, yet it remains malignant.
He added that it was ridiculous for Wu to evaluate the nation’s security using just his “feelings.”
DPP caucus whip William Lai (賴清德) said China wanted to take over Taiwan and that Wu had become a tool of Beijing’s ambitions.
Lai said the direction of China’s missiles would not follow Wu’s “feelings.”
KMT Secretary-General Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) stood firm behind Wu Poh-hsiung’s remarks, calling on China to decrease the number of the missiles as a gesture of goodwill.
Wu Den-yih said Beijing had told the party on many occasions that the missiles were aimed at “the Pacific Ocean,” but he said Beijing should consider Taiwanese “feelings,” since both sides wanted to create a win-win situation and put controversies aside.
Wu Den-yih said it was “very difficult” to ask China to remove the missiles immediately, given Beijing’s own national defense needs, but he believed Beijing knows it must reduce Taiwanese negative feelings toward China resulting from the deployment of the missiles.
He said he believed the Chinese leadership would deliberate on the issue with “goodwill” and “sincerity.”
KMT caucus deputy secretary-general Chang Hsien-yao (張顯耀) said the party hoped that the upcoming talks between the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) and China’s Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait (ARATS) would help to institutionalize communications across the Strait.
He said that military tension could be further reduced through the establishment of a confidence-building mechanism in military affairs.
In related news, Wu Den-yih said gaining entry to the WHO using the name “Chinese Taipei” was a way to put aside controversy and serve the interests of the Taiwanese people.
He said the nation’s participation in APEC and on the International Olympic Committee using the name “Chinese Taipei” was acceptable to all sides and does not provoke any controversy in terms of sovereignty.
“Can our young athletes compete and honor the nation in the Olympic Games if we do not use the title ‘Chinese Taipei’? If we do not use this title, we will even encounter difficulty attending the meetings of APEC or the WTO,” he said.
The nation should never make concessions in terms of sovereignty, but controversy should be put aside, he said.
“This is the best way to safeguard the interests of our people,” he said.
Wu was commenting on a Chinese-language China Times report yesterday, which cited an anonymous KMT source as saying that Beijing had agreed to discuss Taiwan’s participation in the WHO during the upcoming talks between SEF and ARATS.
The story said that the KMT government was considering proposing Taiwan’s participation using the name “Chinese Taipei,” although the proposal was not finalized.
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