Taiwan can do something for China, particularly in charitable services for disadvantaged groups, Taiwan’s top representative to the Boao Forum told Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) on Saturday.
Fredrick Chien (錢復), a former president of the Control Yuan who also served as minister of foreign affairs and representative to the US, met Wen on the sidelines of the annual international forum of government officials and business leaders in Hainan.
Only the first few minutes of the Chien-Wen meeting were open for media coverage, with the rest occurring behind closed doors.
Chien told reporters after his longer-than-expected talks with Wen that he came up with several proposals in his capacity as a private citizen, not as a representative of Taiwan’s government.
Chien said he told Wen that Taiwan’s Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Foundation was planning to build a new community in Indonesia that would include hospitals, factories, schools and housing units to accommodate 4,000 households in a slum.
The project also includes developing tourism in the area.
Chien, who is attending the forum as the top adviser to the Taipei-based Cross-Strait Common Market Foundation, said the foundation had expressed its willingness to organize a similar project in China.
Chien said that some Taiwanese civic groups had also helped with the restoration of the ancient Loulan Castle in Xinjiang.
Responding to remarks by Wen that the two sides of the Taiwan Strait were connected at the roots and shared the same blood, Chien said he noticed that in his March 5 report to the National People’s Congress, Wen advocated the idea of cross-strait “peaceful development” and boosting bilateral engagement on an equal footing.
Chien told Wen that he looked forward to seeing China help Taiwan realize its goal of receiving 1 million Chinese visitors each year and purchase home appliances to help Taiwanese makers weather out the global economic recession.
In an effort to allay the apprehensions of some pro-independence groups over rumors that he could be President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) representative to broach the proposal of signing an economic cooperation framework agreement (ECFA) with China, Chien said he did not mention the matter in his talks with Wen, nor did he touch on the county’s desire to join the ASEAN Plus Three regional economic bloc.
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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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