The chairman of China’s Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait (ARATS) will not be welcome to visit Taiwan until Beijing apologizes for the toxic milk scare it caused in Taiwan and compensates the victims and affected businesses, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) said yesterday.
ARATS Chairman Chen Yunlin (陳雲林) is expected to visit Taiwan sometime next month. The exact date is uncertain.
“The toxic milk powder issue has caused great panic in Taiwan and President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) government should demand an apology and compensation from China,” said Cheng Wen-tsang (鄭文燦), director of the DPP’s Department of Culture and Communications.
It was discovered two weeks ago that 25 tonnes of milk powder that had been imported from Sanlu Group in China in June as an ingredient for food manufacturing contained dangerously high levels of melamine.
Last week, officials discovered that some Chinese non-dairy creamers and malt extract that had been imported into Taiwan were also contaminated with the chemical, resulting in a massive recall of products on the domestic market.
Unless China apologizes and compensates Taiwanese whose health has been undermined as well as the companies that have sustained massive losses because of the tainted imports, Chen is not welcome in Taiwan, Cheng said.
DPP Chairwoman Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) said on Saturday that Chen owed Taiwan “many apologies,” and that it would fuel public anger if he were to visit the country amid the toxic milk powder scare.
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) said yesterday the DPP was trying to prevent the Chinese official from visiting Taiwan to conduct cross-strait negotiations next month.
The KMT issued a statement on behalf of party Deputy Secretary-General Chang Jung-kung (張榮恭) blasting Tsai for saying that the timing was not right for Chen to come to Taiwan next month.
Chang said Tsai’s remarks were aimed at hampering the sound development of cross-strait relations and creating a political stumbling block to negotiations.
Chang said Taiwan’s Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) and its Chinese counterpart, ARATS, were established to conduct cross-strait negotiations, setting aside cross-strait disputes over Taiwan’s sovereignty.
This has not only won the support of the Taiwanese public, but also gained recognition from the international community, he said.
Both sides of the Strait would become embroiled in fiercer political confrontation if Taiwan’s sovereignty were to become an issue during the negotiations with Chen, as Tsai had proposed, Chang said.
What the country needed was not for the two sides to stop negotiating, he said.
The former DPP administration attempted to reopen communication channels between the SEF and ARATS, but it had never proposed talks on sovereignty, Chang said.
“The DPP’s position now is that it does not want to see both sides undertake friendly interactions,” he said. “They are afraid that once the two sides develop a friendly relationship, it would diminish the maneuvering space for Taiwanese independence.”
Following SEF-ARATS talks in June this year, the second round of negotiations between the two agencies next month would help upgrade Taiwan’s competitiveness, Chang said, adding that sovereignty would not be an issue.
The DPP would only disgrace itself if it were to continue stubbornly boycotting the upcoming meeting, he said.
Concerning the tainted milk powder scandal, Chang said both sides should engage in more communications so that the problem could be properly addressed and a mechanism be established to ensure food safety.
He said it did not make sense for the DPP to oppose Chen’s visit because of the tainted milk scandal, as the SEF and ARATS planned to include food safety in the agenda of next month’s meeting.
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