No war will break out in the Taiwan Strait over the next four years, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) is expected to announce today, an official at the Presidential Office said yesterday.
The official, who asked to remain anonymous, said Ma was scheduled to make the announcement during a speech to military officials at a workshop organized by the National Defense University in Taoyuan County.
The official denied that Ma’s comments had anything to do with the upcoming visit of China’s Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait Chairman Chen Yunlin (陳雲林), who is scheduled to arrive later this month or early next month.
Asked by the Taipei Times why Ma was so confident there would not be war in the Taiwan Strait during his presidency, the official said: “It is because we have a strong national defense, so Beijing does not dare to attack.”
The official emphasized that Ma would elaborate on his theory in the speech today.
One way to achieve that goal was to strengthen national defense, the official said.
The official said Ma would make sure his administration purchased defensive weaponry for the armed forces, but at the same time the armed forces must utilize their professional knowledge to help the president elaborate a better strategy to defend the country.
The official said that since Ma has refined his military strategy since he took office in May, he would like to use the opportunity to share his ideas with senior military officials at the workshop and encourage them to offer their professional input.
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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