Former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) yesterday sought to dispel a rumor that he had been a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) member, saying he had never applied for membership.
“However, to say that I was never involved with the CCP would be an overstatement,” he said when asked about the rumor during a question-and-answer session with reporters during a visit to Green Island (綠島).
Lee said he wanted to erase any doubts once and for all since “my political career is over.”
As a senior at National Taiwan University who was concerned about Taiwan’s future, he organized the “New Democracy Association” with four other students from the university, Lee said.
The association was absorbed by the CCP not long afterwards, Lee said, adding that by that time he was disappointed with the CCP because “all it cared about was winning political power rather than people’s lives and the country’s future.”
Lee said he left the association and applied for a scholarship to study at Iowa State University.
He said he was very interested in the theory of socialism and understood “quite a bit” about communism, but he was not interested in the CCP.
Lee was detained and questioned by the Taiwan Garrison Command for a week in 1968 when he was a National Taiwan University professor. He said he was interrogated about his contacts with the CCP and the association.
Wu Ketai (吳克泰), a high-school classmate of Lee’s who went to China in the late 1940s and became a high-ranking CCP official, told Chinese media in the early 2000s that he had endorsed Lee’s membership application to the CCP in 1946 and that Lee had quit the party twice.
Wu, who became a member of the People’s Political Consultative Conference, died in 2004.
Lee’s alleged party membership has been reported on since he left office in 2000.
Taiwan has received more than US$70 million in royalties as of the end of last year from developing the F-16V jet as countries worldwide purchase or upgrade to this popular model, government and military officials said on Saturday. Taiwan funded the development of the F-16V jet and ended up the sole investor as other countries withdrew from the program. Now the F-16V is increasingly popular and countries must pay Taiwan a percentage in royalties when they purchase new F-16V aircraft or upgrade older F-16 models. The next five years are expected to be the peak for these royalties, with Taiwan potentially earning
STAY IN YOUR LANE: As the US and Israel attack Iran, the ministry has warned China not to overstep by including Taiwanese citizens in its evacuation orders The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) yesterday rebuked a statement by China’s embassy in Israel that it would evacuate Taiwanese holders of Chinese travel documents from Israel amid the latter’s escalating conflict with Iran. Tensions have risen across the Middle East in the wake of US and Israeli airstrikes on Iran beginning Saturday. China subsequently issued an evacuation notice for its citizens. In a news release, the Chinese embassy in Israel said holders of “Taiwan compatriot permits (台胞證)” issued to Taiwanese nationals by Chinese authorities for travel to China — could register for evacuation to Egypt. In Taipei, the ministry yesterday said Taiwan
Taiwan is awaiting official notification from the US regarding the status of the Agreement on Reciprocal Trade (ART) after the US Supreme Court ruled US President Donald Trump's global tariffs unconstitutional. Speaking to reporters before a legislative hearing today, Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) said that Taiwan's negotiation team remains focused on ensuring that the bilateral trade deal remains intact despite the legal challenge to Trump's tariff policy. "The US has pledged to notify its trade partners once the subsequent administrative and legal processes are finalized, and that certainly includes Taiwan," Cho said when asked about opposition parties’ doubts that the ART was
If China chose to invade Taiwan tomorrow, it would only have to sever three undersea fiber-optic cable clusters to cause a data blackout, Jason Hsu (許毓仁), a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislator, told a US security panel yesterday. In a Taiwan contingency, cable disruption would be one of the earliest preinvasion actions and the signal that escalation had begun, he said, adding that Taiwan’s current cable repair capabilities are insufficient. The US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) yesterday held a hearing on US-China Competition Under the Sea, with Hsu speaking on
RSS