Warning that a kind of "regional Armageddon" could result, Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said yesterday that he would urge China not to use force to resolve its dispute with Taiwan during a visit by Chinese President Jiang Zemin (
Jiang is scheduled to make a four-day visit to Australia before attending the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Auckland, New Zealand, where he will also hold talks with US President Bill Clinton.
Tension in the Taiwan Strait has heightened as Beijing stepped up military pressure on Taiwan to retract a recent affirmation of statehood by President Lee Teng-hui (
PHOTO: CHIANG YING-YINGN
Downer said military force to resolve the issue was unacceptable.
"We will be saying to President Jiang ... that we obviously take a very strong view against the use of force in the Taiwan Strait," Downer said on the Ten network's Meet the Press program.
"What Beijing understands is that any military conflict with Taiwan would have simply horrendous implications for China's relationship with the United States," he said.
"A war between China and the United States is something tantamount to a regional Armageddon."
Australian anxiety about tensions between China and Taiwan was raised by Jiang's insistence to The Australian newspaper last week that China reserved the right to use force to reunite with Taiwan.
Jiang said China's preferred policy was reunification by peaceful means, but this needed the support of a military option to be effective.
"It is the shared aspiration of the entire 1.2 billion Chinese people to settle the question of Taiwan at an early date," he said. "If China were to undertake not to use force, the peaceful reunification of China would become hollow words."
Among issues expected to be discussed during China-US talks are Taiwan and China's accession to the WTO.
US-China relations have been strained since the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
NO-LIMITS PARTNERSHIP: ‘The bottom line’ is that if the US were to have a conflict with China or Russia it would likely open up a second front with the other, a US senator said Beijing and Moscow could cooperate in a conflict over Taiwan, the top US intelligence chief told the US Senate this week. “We see China and Russia, for the first time, exercising together in relation to Taiwan and recognizing that this is a place where China definitely wants Russia to be working with them, and we see no reason why they wouldn’t,” US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told a US Senate Committee on Armed Services hearing on Thursday. US Senator Mike Rounds asked Haines about such a potential scenario. He also asked US Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has