The more than 1,100 Chinese missiles aimed at Taiwan are less of an impediment to a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) than whether talks would be backed by the people in Taiwan, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said.
Any meeting would be contingent on Ma being present in his capacity as president of the Republic of China, he said in an interview at his office in Taipei on Thursday. While not ruling out an engagement with Xi before the end of his term in 2016, Ma said conditions are not yet ripe.
“The most important factors are whether the country needs it, whether the people support it, that we can meet with dignity — those are the things that will make it possible,” Ma said of a meeting with Xi. “There are conditions yet to be created.”
For Ma, who has seen his popularity slide since his re-election last year, the challenge is to balance his drive for improved relations with China with concerns in Taiwan that closer ties will lead China to dominate its smaller, democratic neighbor.
Ma, 63, said that many of those concerns were misplaced, with some in 2010 having derided the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement to reduce barriers with China as “sugar-coated poison.”
Taiwan will maintain curbs on the inflow of Chinese workers and restrict investments in sensitive industries, he said.
Ma saw his personal disapproval rating rise to 70 percent in May in a poll by Taipei-based cable news network TVBS.
Ma may need more time before a Xi meeting as “there has always been concern that he is going to sell Taiwan to China,” said Peter Kurz, Citigroup’s Taipei-based head of research. “From my standpoint it would be a very positive development. To any extent that there is reduction in cross-strait tension and political risk, it is positive.”
The opposition would not support Ma meeting Xi if he was presented as chairman of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) rather than Taiwan’s president, said Liao Da-chi (廖達琪), director of National Sun Yat-sen University’s Institute of Political Science.
“China won’t accept Ma as a president making a meeting in the remainder of his term difficult,” Liao said.
Under the Ma administration’s closer economic ties with China, Chinese tourists spent NT$292.6 billion (US$9.8 billion) in Taiwan from 2008 till June 30 this year. Last year, more than 2 million Chinese tourists visited, making up 43 percent of leisure visitors.
“Since 2003, China has been our biggest trade partner and export market,” Ma said. “More and more people can see that liberalization is a path Taiwan must take.”
Ma said Taiwan hopes to conclude a trade-in-goods pact with China by the end of this year.
By the end of last year, there were more than 1,100 short-range ballistic missiles targeting Taiwan from China, according to the US Department of Defense’s annual report to Congress.
Ma said the removal of those would not mean much militarily as the projectiles are mobile and could just as quickly be brought back.
It’s China’s refusal to accept Ma as a sovereign leader and meet him on those grounds that is an obstacle to talks.
“Our relationship with mainland China is very subtle. We don’t have a state-to-state relationship and we do not view mainland China as a foreign state,” Ma said.
However, under the ROC Constitution, “we are of course a sovereign nation,” he 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
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