Taiwan said yesterday that it has no plans to adopt cross-strait -confidence-building measures (CBMs) of the kind called for by China.
“The proposed CBMs would involve national security and the Ministry of National Defense will follow the government’s established policy on China in pushing forward such a mechanism gradually, steadily and practically if necessary,” military spokesman Lo Shao-ho (羅紹和) said in response to a renewed proposal from Beijing on cross-strait military exchanges.
In its defense white paper for last year released earlier in the day, Beijing said China and Taiwan could begin military -exchanges, explore the feasibility of adopting CBMs and launch talks on “political relations between the two sides prior to national unification.”
The white paper goes so far as to say that “both sides should finally negotiate the end of hostility by reaching a peace agreement based on the ‘one China’ principle.”
Separately, the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday also said that now is not the time for Taipei and Beijing to discuss political and military issues.
Mainland Affairs Council Deputy Minister Liu Te-shun (劉德勳) declined to set a timetable for such talks, emphasizing that both sides first need to develop more mutual trust through the -existing institutionalized negotiation mechanisms.
“Both sides are facing many problems created by cross-strait exchanges,” Liu said. “Addressing economic problems is our first priority at the moment.”
While the two sides are negotiating, Liu said the council did not want China to have military deployments against Taiwan.
“We think China could remove those missiles unilaterally and immediately,” he said.
If China could take the initiative to remove the missiles targeted at Taiwan, Liu said that would go some way toward deepening the peaceful development of cross-strait ties and building mutual trust.
“Taiwan’s security is the most important indicator of the development of cross-strait relations,” he said. “It is the joint responsibility of the two sides to protect peace across the Taiwan Strait and stability in the region.”
Former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairman Lien Chan (連戰) also recently urged the government to engage in political talks with China.
On Tuesday when attending a book launch in Taipei, he said that while both sides have made progress on economic issues and party to party relations, the only areas where progress had not been made since President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) took office was a peace agreement, a security mechanism and mechanisms to end cross-strait hostility.
Lien urged the two sides to exchange opinions on political issues and seek to resolve areas of disagreement.
Liu yesterday said that the government’s policy is to tackle economic issues first, before it addresses political ones, adding there are still many economic issues resulting from cross-strait exchanges that need to be addressed.
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
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
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