President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday said the plan to acquire F-16C/D aircraft from the US remained unchanged and that improved cross-strait relations would not affect the government’s efforts to maintain the country’s national defense forces.
Ma said his administration would continue to ask the US to expedite the sale of F-16C/Ds and diesel-electric submarines, promising to build a “small, but strong” national defense force to safeguard the nation.
“We will not engage in a competition for military equipment with mainland China. The government will build the military as a small, but strong national defense force,” he said while presiding over an honors and award ceremony for top-level military officials at the Presidential Office.
Ma’s comments followed a news report that the US government had sent a delegation to Taiwan last week to deliver the news that Washington would not proceed with the sale of the 66 F-16C/D aircraft requested by Taipei, but that it would upgrade Taiwan’s fleet of F-16A/Bs.
The Ministry of National Defense has denied the report by Defense News magazine, saying the government did not receive any such message from Washington.
Ma yesterday said the government was continuing with its plan to accumulate military equipment, and at the same time promote peaceful relations across the Strait to prevent any confrontation.
Ma reiterated what he referred to as “three lines of defense” for the nation, including the institutionalization of relations with China to seek reconciliation, improving the nation’s reputation and seeking international support, and strengthening Taiwan’s national defenses via diplomatic and national defense measures.
However, at a separate setting yesterday, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Tsai Huang-liang (蔡煌瑯) said the US’ reported refusal to sell the F-16C/Ds was shocking news.
He singled out Ma as the one bearing “full responsibility for the failure.”
Saying that the former DPP administration had allocated a budget of about NT$16.6 billion (US$574 million) to purchase the F-16C/D fleet in 2007 afte the US had basically agreed to the sale, Tsai said Ma has no one else to blame but himself.
“The Chinese Nationalist Party [KMT], led by Ma, who served as its chairman at the time, blocked the sale 69 times in the Legislative Yuan as Taiwan missed the best time for the procurement,” Tsai said.
DPP Legislator Chen Ting-fei (陳亭妃) said the Ma administration knew that the US would eventually block the sale, but it has been using a stalling tactic by telling people that negotiations were still ongoing.
KMT Legislator Lin Yu-fang (林郁方), on the other hand, said he believed no decision on the F-16C/Ds would be made until US Vice President Joe Biden returned to the US from his three-nation trip in Asia.
Lin also rebutted DPP lawmakers’ charges that the KMT was to be blamed for the opportunities lost to buy F-16C/Ds because of its opposition to the budget earmarked for the aircraft.
The KMT did not boycott the US$475 million and US$592 million written in the budget by the DPP administration in 2007 and 2008 respectively for the F-16C/Ds, Lin said.
“The money was returned to the Treasury at the end of those fiscal years because the request to buy the F-16C/Ds had yet to be approved by the US,” he said.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY CHRIS WANG AND SHIH HSIU-CHUAN
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
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
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