Among the tens of thousands of visitors to the World Expo in Shanghai last week were a bevy of pan-blue politicians.
Former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairmen Lien Chan (連戰) and Wu Poh-hsiung (吳伯雄), along with People First Party Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜), arrived in Shanghai before the expo’s opening and met Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) on Thursday.
Lien and Wu attended the opening ceremony on Friday night and visited the China pavilion on Saturday morning before joining Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) for the launch of the Taipei pavilion.
PHOTO: BLOOMBERG
After visiting the China pavilion, Lien said the Cross-Strait Peace Development Foundation, of which he is president, would donate 3.13 million yuan (US$450,000) for post-earthquake relief work in Qinghai Province after last month’s quake that killed more than 2,200 people and injured 12,000.
Lien later lauded the Taipei pavilion for demonstrating the city’s great achievements in wireless access and garbage recycling to the world, but declined to comment when asked about Chen Yunlin (陳雲林), chairman of China’s Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait, who accompanied him to the pavilion.
Wu said the invitation to Taiwan and Taipei to participate in the expo was a result of peaceful cross-strait relations, adding that he expected the two sides to increase such exchanges.
“Taiwan’s participation in the Shanghai Expo is the result of us replacing cross-strait confrontation with peaceful cross-strait development. We should push for more cross-strait exchanges,” he said.
A group of pan-blue legislators and Taipei City councilors also attended the expo, while Independent Legislator Kao Chin Su-mei (高金素梅) led a group of Aboriginals who were invited to perform at the expo’s opening ceremony on Friday night.
The military has spotted two Chinese warships operating in waters near Penghu County in the Taiwan Strait and sent its own naval and air forces to monitor the vessels, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) said. Beijing sends warships and warplanes into the waters and skies around Taiwan on an almost daily basis, drawing condemnation from Taipei. While the ministry offers daily updates on the locations of Chinese military aircraft, it only rarely gives details of where Chinese warships are operating, generally only when it detects aircraft carriers, as happened last week. A Chinese destroyer and a frigate entered waters to the southwest
A magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck off the coast of Yilan County at 8:39pm tonight, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said, with no immediate reports of damage or injuries. The epicenter was 38.7km east-northeast of Yilan County Hall at a focal depth of 98.3km, the CWA’s Seismological Center said. The quake’s maximum intensity, which gauges the actual physical effect of a seismic event, was a level 4 on Taiwan’s 7-tier intensity scale, the center said. That intensity level was recorded in Yilan County’s Nanao Township (南澳), Hsinchu County’s Guansi Township (關西), Nantou County’s Hehuanshan (合歡山) and Hualien County’s Yanliao (鹽寮). An intensity of 3 was
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s comment last year on Tokyo’s potential reaction to a Taiwan-China conflict has forced Beijing to rewrite its invasion plans, a retired Japanese general said. Takaichi told the Diet on Nov. 7 last year that a Chinese naval blockade or military attack on Taiwan could constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan, potentially allowing Tokyo to exercise its right to collective self-defense. Former Japan Ground Self-Defense Force general Kiyofumi Ogawa said in a recent speech that the remark has been interpreted as meaning Japan could intervene in the early stages of a Taiwan Strait conflict, undermining China’s previous assumptions
Instead of focusing solely on the threat of a full-scale military invasion, the US and its allies must prepare for a potential Chinese “quarantine” of Taiwan enforced through customs inspections, Stanford University Hoover fellow Eyck Freymann said in a Foreign Affairs article published on Wednesday. China could use various “gray zone” tactics in “reconfiguring the regional and ultimately the global economic order without a war,” said Freymann, who is also a nonresident research fellow at the US Naval War College. China might seize control of Taiwan’s links to the outside world by requiring all flights and ships entering or leaving Taiwan
RSS