CROSS-STRAIT TIES
Lien denies peace pact talk
Former vice president Lien Chan (連戰) on Sunday denied that he raised the issue of a cross-strait peace agreement when he met Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) on the sidelines of the APEC forum summit on Friday. Lien, who was attending the APEC leaders meeting on behalf of President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said: “It was not an appropriate occasion to discuss a cross-strait peace deal ... What I talked about was ‘peace and development,’ and I definitely did not mention a peace agreement.” Lien spent 15 minutes of a press conference at the conclusion of the APEC summit rebutting reports that at a press conference after his meeting with Hu he had said he had raised the peace agreement proposal. Lien said he and Hu reiterated the significant role the (so-called) “1992 consensus” has played in cross-strait exchanges.
Photo: Richard A. Brooks/AFP
DEFENSE
Rehearsal for air drill held
The military staged a rehearsal yesterday for a drill that will be held for the first time on the Jiadong Readiness Runway in Pingtung County as part of joint combat training operations. Fighter aircraft and helicopters, including F-16s, Mirage-2000s, Indigenous Defense Fighters and E2-Ks, made reconnaissance flights over the area earlier in the day. The highway will be used as a forward base on Thursday to provide supplies of fuel and ammunition during the “Chang Ching No. 12” training exercises, which began yesterday and runs through Friday. It is the first time a military drill has been held on the expressway since it was built 24 years ago. The army prepared the highway section a month ago, clearing potential obstacles such as street lamps, utility poles and trees. The biggest feature of the exercise is the participation of all three branches of the armed forces.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift