Taiwanese would not necessarily support President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) aspiration to attend this year’s APEC leaders’ summit if all he wanted to achieve by such a move was meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) said yesterday.
Ma told TVBS in an interview on Monday that the necessary conditions are not currently in place for him to attend the APEC summit in October this year in Bali, Indonesia, but he will continue his efforts to create a framework under which he could attend.
The DPP supports Taiwan’s desire for a presence at the summit, DPP spokesperson Lin Chun-hsien (林俊憲) told a news conference, but said that Ma has not previously shown much interest in attending the meeting over the past five years.
“Everyone would support Ma’s participation if his presence expanded Taiwan’s international participation and had a positive influence on its economic development. However, if his sudden shift of attention to APEC is only to serve his personal agenda of meeting Xi, people may change their minds on the issue,” Lin said.
Since 1994, it has been standard APEC practice for the host country to send a representative to Taipei to deliver an invitation for the president to attend the summit. The president would then decline the invitation and appoint an envoy to go in his stead.
Lin said the DPP suspects that Ma “is really thinking about attending the leaders’ summit next year in Shanghai.”
Former vice president Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) shared the same concern.
Speaking on Friday at a DPP-organized seminar on cross-strait relations, Lu said the likelihood of Ma attending the Bali summit is “very slim” because “a Chinese president is not likely to meet a Taiwanese president on foreign soil, which would have political implications regarding sovereignty.”
“Ma’s real goal could be [meeting with Xi in] Shanghai,” she said, adding that if Ma did meet Xi in Shanghai, his capacity in the meeting would be under the public spotlight.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the