President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said yesterday that plans for the first official meeting between the heads of the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) and the Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) next year was a positive development for cross-strait relations and could see the two sides break a negotiations deadlock.
MAC Minister Wang Yu-chi (王郁琦) and TAO Director Zhang Zhijun (張志軍) are to meet in an official capacity after the Lunar New Year holidays in February. They first met in October, when they sat in on talks between former vice president Vincent Siew (蕭萬長) and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on the sidelines of the APEC summit in Indonesia.
“The government has been calling on the two sides of the Taiwan Strait not to deny each other’s authority to govern [Taiwan], while not recognizing each other’s sovereignty. It’s a positive development for the officials handling cross-strait affairs to meet with each other,” Ma, who doubles as Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairman, said while presiding over a meeting of the KMT’s Central Standing Committee.
As negotiations on the establishment of representative offices on each side have reached a stalemate on issues such as visitation rights for Taiwanese detained in China, the meeting between Wang and Zhang should seek to establish consensuses on the sticking points and further promote cross-strait exchanges, Ma said.
“If the two sides cannot resolve smaller issues, it will be difficult to make breakthroughs on more serious political matters. The face-to-face communication between the two officials should help resolve these things, and we should react normally to such meetings,” Ma said.
During a report presented yesterday on cross-strait relations following the Chinese Communist Party’s 18th National Congress, Wang said that he would unveil the details of his meeting with Zhang soon.
The Wang-Zhang meeting is to be held in China before the next round of regular meetings between the Straits Exchange Foundation and its Chinese counterpart, the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits, Wang said.
In the report, Wang said that China has been pressing Taiwan through various cross-strait forums to hold political talks and said China could use its declaration of an air defense identification zone (ADIZ) over an area of the East China Sea to promote the establishment of military confidence-building measures between the two sides.
The government stresses the importance of the 1992 consensus as the foundation for cross-strait relations, for handling sovereignty issues and to deepen economic and cultural exchanges, he said.
Ma said that Taiwan will not avoid cross-strait political issues, adding that the time was not right for political talks with China.
He said the signing of bilateral agreements and the proposed establishment of cross-strait representative offices carried some political significance.
“It depends on whether there are urgent issues to be discussed. For example, we’ve called on China to engage in dialogue with concerned parties regarding its ADIZ and we won’t exclude the possibility of including the issue in cross-strait negotiations,” he said.
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
UPDATED TEST: The new rules aim to assess drivers’ awareness of risky behaviors and how they respond under certain circumstances, the Highway Bureau said Driver’s license applicants who fail to yield to pedestrians at intersections or to check blind spots, or omit pointing-and-calling procedures would fail the driving test, the Highway Bureau said yesterday. The change is set to be implemented at the end of the month, and is part of the bureau’s reform of the driving portion of the test, which has been criticized for failing to assess whether drivers can operate vehicles safely. Sedan drivers would be tested regarding yielding to pedestrians and turning their heads to check blind spots, while drivers of large vehicles would be tested on their familiarity with pointing-and-calling
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