The head of Taiwan’s delegation to this year’s Boao Forum for Asia exchanged greetings and chatted briefly with Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) yesterday ahead of the annual event’s opening.
Frederick Chien (錢復), a retired diplomat who was appointed by President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) to head Taiwan’s 38-member delegation, declined, however, to reveal what the two talked about.
Asked if he conveyed any messages from Ma to China’s top leader, Chien simply said: “I’m not a messenger.”
Badgered further by Taiwanese reporters about his brief conversation with Hu, Chien said it would not be appropriate for him to reveal what was said.
PHOTO SESSION
As a result of Hu’s tight schedule, Chien took advantage of a 15-minute photo session between Hu and members of Taiwan’s delegation to chat with Hu twice. The session took place about half an hour before the forum opened.
Chien is attending the forum in his capacity as a senior adviser to the Taipei-based Cross-Strait Common Market Foundation.
Now in its 10th year, the Boao Forum for Asia is modeled after the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and is “committed to promoting regional economic integration and bringing Asian countries even closer to their development goals,” according to its Web site.
Vice President Vincent Siew (蕭萬長) said earlier this week that the Boao Forum is “one of the important platforms for cross-Taiwan Strait affairs.”
Siew’s participation in the Boao Forum in 2008, soon after the Ma-Siew team won Taiwan’s presidential and vice presidential election, was seen as a breakthrough that served as a catalyst for warmer cross-strait ties.
Chien will chair an “Across-Straits Business Roundtable” today, which will explore how Taiwanese businesses can tap into the opportunities created by China’s 12th Five-Year Plan.
COOPERATION
Taiwanese business leaders, especially those from the financial sector, will also seek to discuss with their Chinese counterparts how they can develop further cooperation under the terms of the cross-strait Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) signed in June last year.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, South African President Jacob Zuma, South Korean Prime Minister Kim Hwang-sik and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero were among the heads of state and government leaders who attended the Boao Forum’s opening ceremony.
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:
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