In an interview published in the Indian quarterly India and Global Affairs yesterday, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said he hoped that a cross-strait peace accord could be reached during his term in office.
Ma said there was no timetable in setting up a mechanism for mutual military trust or signing a peace agreement between China and Taiwan. He said that weekend chartered flight services and allowing more Chinese tourists were his administration’s priorities and were accomplished in July. The next step was the push for direct air and sea links, normalization of cross-strait economic relations, and then international participation and a peace agreement, he said.
Negotiating solutions to these issues could not be achieved in the short term, but Ma said he was willing to do his best and hoped to accomplish them during his term.
Ma made the remarks in response to a question asked by the magazine as to whether he would see the more than 1,000 Chinese missiles aimed at Taiwan removed during his presidency.
The interview was conducted in written form in August.
The Presidential Office said yesterday that Ma was stressing that he wanted to achieve these goals during his term in office, but that it was not a formal promise or statement.
In the interview, when asked if the failure to pass the referendums on the UN and constitutional amendments meant that Taiwan would give up these efforts, Ma said it only meant that the Taiwanese people still had different opinions on the name and method to be used for a UN membership bid.
A small number of Taiwanese this year lost their citizenship rights after traveling in China and obtaining a one-time Chinese passport to cross the border into Russia, a source said today. The people signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of neighboring Russia with companies claiming they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, the source said on condition of anonymity. The travelers were actually issued one-time-use Chinese passports, they said. Taiwanese are prohibited from holding a Chinese passport or household registration. If found to have a Chinese ID, they may lose their resident status under Article 9-1
Taiwanese were praised for their composure after a video filmed by Taiwanese tourists capturing the moment a magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck Japan’s Aomori Prefecture went viral on social media. The video shows a hotel room shaking violently amid Monday’s quake, with objects falling to the ground. Two Taiwanese began filming with their mobile phones, while two others held the sides of a TV to prevent it from falling. When the shaking stopped, the pair calmly took down the TV and laid it flat on a tatami mat, the video shows. The video also captured the group talking about the safety of their companions bathing
PROBLEMATIC APP: Citing more than 1,000 fraud cases, the government is taking the app down for a year, but opposition voices are calling it censorship Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday decried a government plan to suspend access to Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu (小紅書) for one year as censorship, while the Presidential Office backed the plan. The Ministry of the Interior on Thursday cited security risks and accusations that the Instagram-like app, known as Rednote in English, had figured in more than 1,700 fraud cases since last year. The company, which has about 3 million users in Taiwan, has not yet responded to requests for comment. “Many people online are already asking ‘How to climb over the firewall to access Xiaohongshu,’” Cheng posted on
A magnitude 5.7 earthquake yesterday struck off the coast of Hualien, causing brief transportation disruptions in northern and eastern Taiwan, as authorities said that aftershocks of magnitude 5 or higher could occur over the next three days. The quake, which hit at 7:24pm at a depth of 24.5km, registered an intensity of 4 in Hualien and Nantou counties, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. There were no immediate reports of damage or injuries. In Taipei, the MRT railway’s operations control center received an earthquake alert and initiated standard safety procedures, briefly halting trains on the Bannan (blue) line for about a minute.
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