President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday expressed high hopes for the negotiating team heading to Beijing tomorrow, saying that he hoped the historic journey would lay the foundations for mutual trust and better long-term relations.
The team, led by Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) Chairman Chiang Pin-kung (江丙坤), is set to negotiate direct cross-strait flights and an increase in the number of Chinese tourists visiting Taiwan.
Ma, who received Chiang and 15 members of the 19-member team at the Presidential Office yesterday morning, said that the negotiations between the SEF and its Chinese counterpart, the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait (ARATS), are not only about weekend charter flights and more Chinese tourists, but also about better long-term cross-strait relations.
“I hope it will pave the way for regular meetings between the two agencies and lay the groundwork for solid ties between the two sides. It is a pity interaction between the two agencies has been dormant for the past decade,” he said.
It is the first meeting between the two agencies since the late SEF chairman Koo Chen-fu (辜振甫) met his ARATS counterpart, Wang Daohan (汪道涵), more than 10 years ago.
Ma, who once served as vice chairman of the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC), lamented the time lost since he and SEF secretary-general Kao Koong-lian (高孔廉) mapped out cross-strait policy and a negotiating strategy 21 years ago.
Ma showed reporters a copy of a proposal he penned 16 years ago on the problems with and the prospects for direct transportation links, saying that he did not have the opportunity to put it into practice.
“Under an atmosphere of detente, we hope to find a way of tackling the various issues,” he said. “It may take some time to resolve them, but we don’t want to see them become a hindrance to more urgent matters.”
As long as both sides could shelve differences and seek common ground, Ma said, mutual trust would follow. He said he realized negotiations on direct transportation would take time, but both sides have agreed to negotiate on the basis of the so-called “1992 consensus.” No matter who is in power, both sides will only benefit if they work on the issues that they agree on, he said.
Meanwhile, Taiwan Solidarity Union Chairman Huang Kun-huei (黃昆輝) urged the negotiating team to safeguard Taiwan’s dignity and emphasize a Taiwan-centered consciousness at the negotiating table.
While he supported the resumption of talks, Huang said he hoped that future negotiations would be conducted through a single channel and said that the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) should leave the matter to the SEF and the MAC.
Huang also expressed concern over the hasty resumption of talks and the timetables for weekend charter flights and Chinese tourism, saying they was unwise.
He made the remarks after visiting MAC Chairwoman Lai Shin-yuan (賴幸媛) yesterday morning.
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) also issued a statement opposing the SEF and ARATS signing a joint communiques, saying that such a statement would be official endorsement of the “one China” principle under the so-called “1992 consensus” and the five-point consensus reached by former KMT chairman Lien Chan (連戰) and Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤).
Beijing would use the joint statement to force the Ma administration to accept the negotiation framework set up by the KMT and Chinese Communist Party, the DPP said.
The DPP said it firmly opposed any consensus that did not go through the debate process in Taiwan, regardless of whether it was in the form of an agreement, meeting minutes or a press release.
The DPP said that Beijing tried to use its “Anti-Secession” Law, the communiques signed by Lien and Hu and between Hu and People First Party Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜) to set the course for cross-strait negotiations.
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
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: