Former vice president Lien Chan (連戰) is expected to meet with Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) when he attends this year’s leadership meeting of the APEC forum in Japan this weekend on behalf of President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九).
Chinese opposition has prevented Taiwan’s presidents from attending the annual APEC summit, forcing them to name a proxy to attend the meeting in their stead.
This is the third year that Ma has appointed Lien to serve as his envoy.
On the last two occasions, Lien met the Chinese president on the sidelines of the APEC forum and is expected to meet with Hu again during the Nov. 13 to Nov. 14 summit in Yokohama. The two are likely to discuss issues of concern to both sides of the Taiwan Strait and regional cooperation, officials familiar with the matter said.
It remains to be seen whether Lien will touch on the thorny issue of removing the missiles deployed by Beijing along the southeastern Chinese coast and targeted at Taiwan, political analysts said.
Lien Chan is scheduled to meet Ma today, when the president will reiterate Taiwan’s support for economic integration in the region and report on Taiwan’s economic development since signing the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) with China in June.
In related news, Minister of Finance Lee Sush-der (李述德) is attending the APEC Finance Ministers’ Meeting in Kyoto, Japan, where he is explaining how Taiwan survived the global financial storm through successful monetary and financial policies.
Lee will be accompanied by Minister of Economic Affairs Shih Yen-shiang (施顏祥) when he attends the APEC ministerial meeting in Yokohama that begins on Wednesday.
During the ministerial meeting, Taiwan, along with Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea, will be assessed on the basis of the Bogor goals, a declaration issued by APEC leaders in Bogor, Indonesia, in 1994.
These called for industrialized member economies to achieve free and open trade by this year and those of developing members by 2020.
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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