People on both sides of the Taiwan Strait should rise above their differences and seek cooperation when dealing with foreign affairs, China’s Taiwan Affairs Office Minister Wang Yi (王毅) said yesterday, in a call that received a lukewarm response from Taipei.
According to reports by the China-based China News Service, Wang made the remark during his speech at the first Yunnan-Taiwan Economic and Cultural Seminar held in Kunming, China, yesterday.
Former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairman Lien Chan (連戰) and former KMT vice chairman Lin Fong-cheng (林豐正) attended the symposium.
“More than six decades ago, when the Chinese Expeditionary Force [during the Second Sino-Japanese War] fought against the Japanese aggressors in Western Yunnan, [their fortitude and bravery] were so magnificent and touching that [they] were etched in history and in the common memory of the people on both sides,” Wang said.
Wang said that whatever complex issues lie between people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, they should transcend their differences and work together in defending the fundamental and overall interests of the Chinese people.
In the face of the profound international changes, Wang also called on people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait to act in the interest of ensuring the prosperity of the Chinese people, ensuring the peaceful development of cross-strait ties and maintaining regional stability.
Wang’s comments came amid an escalating territorial dispute over the Diaoyutai Islands (釣魚台), a resource-rich island group in the East China Sea claimed by Taiwan and China, as well as Japan, which calls them the Senkaku Islands. The dispute heated up after the Japanese government paid ¥2.05 billion (US$26 million) for three of the islands in the chain on Tuesday last week in an effort to nationalize the archipelago.
The move prompted an angry rebuke from the Chinese government, which accused Japan of “playing with fire,” galvanizing a new wave of anti-Japan sentiment and demonstrations in several cities across China over the past few days.
However, Wang’s proposal did not appear to be welcome by his Taiwanese counterpart, as Mainland Affairs Council Minister Lai Shin-yuan (賴幸媛) reiterated yesterday her stance on Sept. 9 during a visit to London that Taiwan would not cooperate with China on the issue.
“The Republic of China has indisputable sovereignty over the Diaoyutai Islands. In light of the long-running sovereignty dispute across the Taiwan Strait, the idea of cross-strait cooperation to resolve the territorial row is unseemly,” Lai said.
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
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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