President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) “diplomatic truce” with China has not benefited Taiwan as his administration claims, former diplomats from the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) said yesterday.
Ma embarked on a 12-day trip to Africa on Saturday night, visiting the nation’s three diplomatic allies of Burkina Faso, Gambia and Swaziland for the first time since taking office in 2008.
Officials have described Ma’s refueling stop in Mumbai, India, the first ever visit to that country by a Taiwanese president, as a “diplomatic breakthrough” and an example of the benefits that have come from Ma’s “diplomatic truce.”
“The brief stop should not be viewed as a breakthrough, but part of normal engagement between two countries,” former representative to the US Joseph Wu (吳釗燮) said on the sidelines of a forum in Taipei yesterday.
Diplomacy values continuity above everything else, Wu said, adding that while the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) had criticized the former DPP administration for what it said was “checkbook diplomacy,” Ma’s foreign policy remained “pretty much the same.”
The president did not take time to visit the nation’s allies in Africa until the final year of his first term in office, which means that he does not value the friendship with those countries, Wu added.
Meanwhile, former National Security Council deputy secretary-general Parris Chang (張旭成) said yesterday that Ma’s diplomatic truce with China had placed the nation’s 23 diplomatic allies in a dilemma.
Some allies want to switch recognition to Beijing, but China has declined such overtures, which means “the diplomatic truce is not really a truce at all,” Chang said.
Separately yesterday, former DPP chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) said the refueling stop in India was “at best a minor breakthrough.”
“The glaring problem with Ma’s foreign policy is the lack of any balance as the president has focused on Taiwan’s relationship with China to the exclusion of all others and as a result diplomacy has not been at the heart of his administration,” said Tsai, who was in Lugang (鹿港), Changhua County, yesterday.
The Africa trip is Ma’s sixth foreign trip since becoming president. The last time a Taiwanese head of state visited the continent was former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) in 2002.
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
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
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