American Institute in Taiwan Chairman Raymond Burghardt told President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) during his stopover in San Francisco that cross-strait relations had improved, Presidential Office Spokesman Wang Yu-chi (王郁琦) said yesterday.
Completing his eight-day state visit to Latin America and the Caribbean, Ma had an eight-hour transit in the city on his way back to Taiwan.
Ma also met four US congressmen and senators and called 14 others from his hotel, while holding a private dinner with about 50 people, including friends in the academic and political community.
Among the US senators who met Ma were US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi as well as Frank Murkowski and John Rockefeller.
Wang said the US lawmakers told Ma that Washington would continue to support Taiwan whether Democratic candidate Barack Obama or Republican candidate John McCain wins the US presidential election in November.
The issues discussed during Ma’s various meetings included cross-strait relations, the signing of a US-Taiwan free-trade agreement and Taipei’s readiness to purchase the eight major weapons systems that have allegedly been frozen by the US government through the delaying of the congressional notification process.
Ma said he was planning to visit Kinmen on Saturday to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 823 Artillery Bombardment.
“There are great differences between the past and now. What the public wants now is not war, but a bridge between Taiwan and China,” Ma was quoted by Wang as saying.
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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