Former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) yesterday confirmed that he would visit Japan next month, health permitting, and said that an all-out war waged by North Korea was unlikely.
Kyodo news agency reported yesterday that Lee, 90, would travel to Japan and deliver speeches in Tokyo and Zama City, Kanagawa Prefecture.
Lee addressed a wide range of issues, including the possibility of a trip to Japan, the North Korean situation and political parties’ cross-strait policies, in a 20-minute media interview in Nanliao (南寮) on the first day of a two-day visit to Hsinchu County.
Photo: Hung Mei-hsiu, Taipei Times
When asked about a visit to Japan, Lee said it would depend on the result of a medical checkup later this month.
Lee has a chronic heart problem, metabolic arthritis and recently suffered a bout of the flu. If he makes the trip, it would be his sixth visit to Japan since leaving office in 2000, but his first since 2009.
Turning to the recent tensions in Northeast Asia, Lee said anyone who wants to wage a war, in this case North Korea, was not likely to resort to taunts and rhetoric.
Citing the Taiwan Strait crisis of 1996 during his presidency, Lee said that China had not alerted Taiwan prior to launching missiles. He added that North Korea could have hidden agenda behind its threats.
Lee laughed off a report this week by Control Yuan members Chou Yang-shan (周陽山) and Lee Ping-nan (李炳南) that quoted Shih Hsin University adjunct assistant professor Chi Chia-lin (戚嘉林) as saying that Lee was the illegitimate son of a Japanese father.
The accusation was false and those who made it up had a hidden motive, he said.
“I pray to God to forgive their sins and stupidity. Taiwan’s future is more important to me than things like this,” said Lee, a Christian.
Asked if the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Democratic Progressive Party should seek a consensus on their policies toward China, Lee said they may not be able to find common ground, but they “should at least maintain a healthy relationship with each other.”
“Taiwan is Taiwan, China is China,” he said, adding that the most important tasks now are improving people’s livelihoods, and boosting employment and economic growth.
The KMT administration depends on Beijing’s assistance and favor in almost everything, which the DPP finds very hard to accept or emulate, Lee said.
With regards to Washington’s role in cross-strait relations, Lee said the US has always taken positions that serve its own interests and has always adjusted its policy according to the situation.
Lee visited Nanliao Harbor in the afternoon before delivering a speech, titled “Taiwanese in a new age,” at National Chiao Tung University.
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