Taiwan yesterday urged Seoul and Pyongyang to settle their differences through the use of peaceful means rather than confrontation, calling on the two to consider patterning their interactions after the recent thaw in cross-strait ties.
Tension on the peninsula has escalated in the last few weeks as North Korea plans to go ahead with a rocket launch next month disregarding appeals from the UN, the US, and neighboring countries not to do so. While Pyongyang claims it is launching a communication satellite, Seoul, Washington and Tokyo see it as a disguised long-range missile test.
“Although Taiwan is not a member of the six-party talks, we want to take the opportunity to urge both sides to [settle the dispute] with dialogue in lieu of confrontation,” said Victor Yu (于德勝), director-general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’s (MOFA) Department of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, adding that the situation in the Korean Peninsula greatly affects Taiwan’s security and economic development.
Despite an absence of a diplomatic ties since 1992, Taiwan and South Korea enjoy close commercial and cultural relations, said Yu, citing an annual bilateral trade volume of US$26 billion.
Yu said Taiwan is looking to launch a working holiday program for young adults with South Korea. The topic will be among the discussion items in trade talks to be held in South Korea later this year, he said.
The ministry yesterday also called on China to stop interfering in Taiwan’s efforts to expand trade relations with other countries, such as ASEAN members, saying Beijing remains the biggest obstacle to Taiwan forging closer economic ties with other nations.
Saying that Taiwan hopes to have more direct access to ASEAN, so far Taiwan has had to resort to a gradual “block building” method to negotiate with individual ASEAN members separately on a possible free trade agreement (FTA), Yu said.
He said that Taiwan is not waiting for approval from Beijing before launching FTA negotiations with other countries as such talks have been ongoing.
The ideal situation would be for Taiwan to become an ASEAN dialogue partner, he said, acknowledging that in the short term, the chances of Taiwan joining ASEAN plus three were extremely slim because of the organization’s refusal to accept any more dialogue partners and the current cross-strait rapprochement.
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
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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