President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday lauded the late president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) efforts in paving the way for cross-strait exchanges and vowed to continue improving cross-strait relations.
“Late president Chiang made the first step to unfreeze cross-strait relations by allowing the public to visit relatives in mainland China,” Ma said at the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) headquarters, adding that “cross-strait relations over the past 10 months are at their most peaceful” in the past six decades.
Ma was speaking at a forum on Chiang’s legacy, the first of a series of activities organized by the KMT and the Presidential Office to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Chiang’s birth.
Chiang family members and former officials under his administration, including daughter-in-law Chiang Fang Chih-yi (蔣方智怡), son KMT Legislator John Chiang (蔣孝嚴), former premier Hau Pei-tsun (郝柏村) and former Control Yuan president Frederick Chien (錢復), were present at the forum yesterday.
Ma, who once served as Chiang Ching-kuo’s English secretary, praised him as a politician with vision and wisdom. He said Chiang’s decision to lift martial law, relax restrictions on visiting relatives in China, remove the ban on forming political parties and initiate major infrastructure projects paved the way for democratic reform and helped create an economic miracle.
“Taiwan would not be a developed country today if not for Mr. Ching-kuo’s policies and former president Lee Teng-hui’s (李登輝) efforts to continue his unfinished goal of making Taiwan a democratic country,” he said.
Saying that Chiang Ching-kuo dedicated his life to developing Taiwan, Ma pledged to follow in the late president’s footsteps and seek the best for Taiwanese based on the “Taiwan-centric” concept.
Before the start of the forum, Ma visited the KMT’s party history room to view photos and historical documents of Chiang Ching-kuo and other KMT leaders.
Former KMT chairman Lien Chan (連戰), who is currently visiting China, issued a statement praising the late president yesterday, and dismissed concerns that the party was deifying Chiang Ching-kuo through the activities.
“The late president Chiang brought democracy and wealth to Taiwan ... We are not trying to deify him because it is unnecessary. We are reflecting on ourselves through these events,” he said.
Chiang Ching-kuo took over the presidency in 1978. He died in 1988, a year after the lifting of martial law.
Historica Sinica will hold an exhibition through Sept. 13 in commemoration of Chiang Ching-kuo.
Chiang Ching-kuo’s English-language biographer, Jay Taylor, will speak at a forum today at Eslite Bookstore in Taipei’s Xinyi District (信義).
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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
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