Minister of National Defense Kao Hua-chu (高華柱) said he would seek more weapons from the US to give Taiwan greater confidence in pushing for rapprochement with China.
The remarks came as Beijing and Washington are locked in an escalating row over a large US arms sale to Taiwan.
China has responded furiously with a raft of reprisals, saying it would suspend military and security contacts with Washington and impose sanctions on US firms involved in the US$6.4 billion arms package.
But Kao defended the arms sale on Saturday, saying the package would help stabilize the Taiwan Strait.
“The US has kept providing Taiwan with defensive weapons according to the Taiwan Relations Act, enabling Taiwan to be more confident in pressing for reconciliation with the Chinese mainland,” the Military News Agency quoted him as saying.
Speaking at a security conference in Munich, Germany, on Friday, Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi (楊潔箎) said US arms sales to Taiwan violated international relations standards and would provoke a reaction from Beijing.
In response, Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) said Beijing’s missile buildup had prompted Taiwan to seek more defensive weapons.
“It’s just like two people trying for reconciliation. If one of them sticks a gun in his waist, it would be weird, don’t you think?” Wu said in an interview with Hong Kong-based Phoenix satellite TV on Saturday.
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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