Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) Chairman Chiang Pin-kung (江丙坤) is scheduled to take a delegation of local media to China later this month, but the Apple Daily, which has been a vocal critic of the Chinese authorities, was not invited.
Chiang and the delegation are scheduled to leave for Beijing on Oct. 28 and return on Nov. 1. The foundation yesterday said that the purpose of the trip was to allow media from both sides of the Taiwan Strait to interact with each other.
The SEF has invited the Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister paper), but the paper declined the invitation. Other pro-independence media such as Formosa TV and Sanlih E-TV will attend.
The Apple Daily was the only media organization not invited. The SEF yesterday said that its Chinese counterpart, the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait, told them it was “inconvenient” for the Apple Daily to participate in the exchanges.
An SEF board member who spoke on condition of anonymity said that it had much to do with the sour relationship between the Apple Daily and Chinese leaders.
He said the paper had harshly criticized Beijing since the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989. The grudges former leaders hold still affected successors, he said, adding that the ban was unlikely to be lifted soon.
The Apple Daily yesterday said that they “understood” why they were not invited.
Since taking office in May last year, the administration of President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has focused cross-strait negotiations on boosting trade and investment.
To promote “Chinese culture,” Ma in June proposed that both sides venture into the “cultural” sphere.
The idea was echoed in the recent Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)-Chinese Communist Party forum. The forum agreed to push for cross-strait cultural and educational cooperation and strengthen media exchanges.
Last month, the two sides held a “cultural summit” in Beijing to discuss several issues important to the promotion of cross-strait cultural exchanges, including arranging exchange visits by cultural officials, organizing exhibitions, protecting intellectual property rights, cooperating on film production and promoting media exchanges.
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