China’s Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) warned the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) yesterday that it risked serious problems if it pressed for independence.
“If [their] cross-strait policy is established on a ‘Taiwan independence’ splittist basis ... it does not matter how ingenious the packaging, it will certainly ... damage the peaceful development of cross-strait relations and affect stability in the Taiwan Strait,” TAO spokesman Yang Yi (楊毅) said.
The remark came as DPP Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) won the party’s primary yesterday, securing her candidacy for next year’s presidential election, the first woman in Taiwan’s history to run for the post.
In a sign of a close-run contest, a poll taken shortly after the DPP announcement by the Prediction Market Center of Taiwan’s National Chengchi University gave the opposition party a 50.5 percent probability of winning the poll and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), 49.9 percent probability.
The KMT held on to key seats in local elections last year, but fell behind the DPP in terms of percentage of the overall vote. The result was seen as a test of the party’s popularity ahead of the Jan. 14 poll.
Tsai, 54, a polished English speaker who holds a law doctorate from the London School of Economics, will run against President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) of the KMT.
“Right now, Ma and Tsai have about an equal chance of winning,” said David Huang (黃偉峰), associate research fellow at the Institute of European and American Studies at Academia Sinica.
Taiwanese were praised for their composure after a video filmed by Taiwanese tourists capturing the moment a magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck Japan’s Aomori Prefecture went viral on social media. The video shows a hotel room shaking violently amid Monday’s quake, with objects falling to the ground. Two Taiwanese began filming with their mobile phones, while two others held the sides of a TV to prevent it from falling. When the shaking stopped, the pair calmly took down the TV and laid it flat on a tatami mat, the video shows. The video also captured the group talking about the safety of their companions bathing
US climber Alex Honnold is to attempt to scale Taipei 101 without a rope and harness in a live Netflix special on Jan. 24, the streaming platform announced on Wednesday. Accounting for the time difference, the two-hour broadcast of Honnold’s climb, called Skyscraper Live, is to air on Jan. 23 in the US, Netflix said in a statement. Honnold, 40, was the first person ever to free solo climb the 900m El Capitan rock formation in Yosemite National Park — a feat that was recorded and later made into the 2018 documentary film Free Solo. Netflix previewed Skyscraper Live in October, after videos
Starting on Jan. 1, YouBike riders must have insurance to use the service, and a six-month trial of NT$5 coupons under certain conditions would be implemented to balance bike shortages, a joint statement from transportation departments across Taipei, New Taipei City and Taoyuan announced yesterday. The rental bike system operator said that coupons would be offered to riders to rent bikes from full stations, for riders who take out an electric-assisted bike from a full station, and for riders who return a bike to an empty station. All riders with YouBike accounts are automatically eligible for the program, and each membership account
A classified Pentagon-produced, multiyear assessment — the Overmatch brief — highlighted unreported Chinese capabilities to destroy US military assets and identified US supply chain choke points, painting a disturbing picture of waning US military might, a New York Times editorial published on Monday said. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s comments in November last year that “we lose every time” in Pentagon-conducted war games pitting the US against China further highlighted the uncertainty about the US’ capability to intervene in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. “It shows the Pentagon’s overreliance on expensive, vulnerable weapons as adversaries field cheap, technologically
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