Taiwan should make better preparations for future cross-strait relations, as China will soon have a new leader who might adopt a different attitude toward Taiwan, Taipei Forum Foundation Su Chi (蘇起) said.
Su, a former National Security Council secretary-general, expressed concern that “Taiwan is not well-prepared” for the upcoming leadership change that will most probably see Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping (習近平) become China’s new president after the Chinese Communist Party holds its 18th National Congress, which is scheduled to open today.
Compared with other Chinese leaders, Xi — who has spent years in China’s Fujian Province and had extensive interaction with Taiwanese businesspeople there — knows more about Taiwan, Su said at the forum on the leadership transitions in China and the US organized by the Chinese-language Global Views Monthly on Tuesday.
Su predicted that Xi might adopt a more proactive approach to engaging with Taiwan than Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤).
Over the past few years, Hu has reduced tensions with Taiwan, Su said. However, Xi will not be satisfied with just “maintaining the cross-strait ‘status quo.’”
In the face of the changing leadership in China, Su cautioned that Taiwan has not conducted sufficient research on Xi during its cross-strait policymaking process.
He also urged Taiwan to recognize that Xi will not follow in Hu’s footsteps and forecast that Beijing will not continue to make concessions to Taiwan in the coming years.
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