The Ministry of Foreign Affairs said yesterday that the Diaoyutai (釣魚台) islands are an inseparable part of the Republic of China’s (ROC) territory and that any different views expressed by former President Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) were his personal opinion.
Lee, who is visiting Okinawa, was quoted by the Central News Agency yesterday as saying at a luncheon hosted by the Okinawa county magistrate yesterday that “The Diaoyutai islands have belonged to Japan since a long time ago.”
Like Taiwan, the island group was part of Japanese territory during its occupation from 1895 until 1945, he said.
Lee has been criticized in the past for making similar comments.
Following a swearing-in ceremony yesterday for ministry officials, including John Feng (馮寄台), the nation’s new representative to Japan, who will be leaving on Saturday to take up his post, Minister of Foreign Affairs Francisco Ou (歐鴻鍊) told reporters that the Diaoyutai islands are under the jurisdiction of the ROC government and that Lee’s views did not dovetail with those of the administration.
Feng said the dispute over the islands was a prolonged issue and should be resolved through diplomatic means.
“We acknowledge that Japan believes the Diaoyutai islands are part of its territory, but this can only be resolved diplomatically,” he said.
Controversy over the sovereignty of the island group was re-ignited this year when a Taiwanese fishing boat sank after colliding with a Japanese patrol vessel on June 10 near the islands, known as the Senkaku Islands in Japanese. Taiwan, Japan and China all claim rights over the islands.
Taiwan and Japan held a 15th round of fishery talks in July 2005 to try to resolve the dispute. While both sides agreed to hold another round of talks in March 2006, they never took place.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
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