Former minister of foreign affairs Francisco Ou (歐鴻鍊) told US officials he “had not instructed Taiwan’s overseas missions how to implement” President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) “diplomatic truce” initiative, US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks showed.
Ou, the Ma administration’s first foreign affairs minister who served from May 2008 until May 2009, said it was “because the President had never explained what exactly it meant.”
His remarks were recorded in a cable dated April 9, 2009, originating from the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) and focusing on the Ma administration’s cross-strait policy.
In the cable, the AIT said Ma had been criticized “for relegating the decision-making process on China policy to a very close circle of advisors, most notably [then-National Security Council] Secretary General Su Chi (蘇起).”
Su resigned from his post in February last year.
“MAC [Mainland Affairs Council] Chairwoman [sic] Lai Shin-yuan (賴幸媛) does not have a central role in policy-making although her views are heard. MOFA [the Ministry of Foreign Affairs] likewise plays little role,” it said.
In two other cables dated Sept. 25 and Oct. 3, 2008, which examined the status of Taiwan’s diplomatic ties with its allies under the “diplomatic truce” policy, the AIT said while Taipei’s allies in Latin America and the South Pacific remained stable, they were fragile.
The October cable quoted Kung Kuo-wei (宮國威), an associate professor at Tamkang University whom the AIT termed one of a small fraternity of academics who specialized in relations between Taiwan and Paraguay, as saying that Paraguay, Panama, Haiti and Honduras had a strong interest in China and were keen on switching ties.
It said that Paraguay was dissatisfied with the strings attached to an aid package offered by Taipei and wanted to establish ties with Beijing, but China gave it the cold shoulder in recognition of Ma’s efforts to reduce cross-strait tensions.
“For now, Taiwan’s Latin American alliances seem stable ... Nevertheless, the situation underscores the fragility of the unilateral ‘diplomatic truce,’” the cable said.
In the September cable, the AIT said Taiwan’s six diplomatic allies in the South Pacific — Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, the Solomon Islands and Tuvalu — were uneasy about the implications of Ma’s efforts to improve cross-strait ties and in particular, his pledge to end the diplomatic war between Taiwan and China.
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