Former premier Frank Hsieh’s (謝長廷) office said yesterday that Hsieh’s plan to organize a cross-strait forum next year was still in the “primitive stages.”
The Chinese-language China Review New Web site yesterday reported that Hsieh’s Taiwan Reform Foundation would organize a forum for academics across the Taiwan Strait in March next year and that he would visit China again in April.
The forum would discuss substantial cross-strait policies rather than the political status of Taiwan and China, the report said.
Office director Lin Yao-wen (林耀文) said the foundation did not rule out holding a seminar on cross-strait relations, but there was “no detailed planning yet, nor was there any decision being made on the location, dates and agenda of the forum.”
Hsieh, who became the first high-ranking DPP politician to visit China with a trip to Xiamen and Beijing in October, is currently on a private trip to the US and was not available for comment.
The visit stirred up intense internal debate within the DPP on the party’s engagement with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The party’s liberal wing has pushed for an active engagement with the CCP, while the conservatives have called for a more cautious approach.
The DPP has reiterated that it does not oppose closer engagement with Beijing and had sent party officials to a number of recent cross-strait forums in Taiwan that were attended by Chinese officials and academics.
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:
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