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.
REASONS FOR TRAVEL: An assistant professor said that proposed amendments to penalize drivers if they used drugs overseas would not deter people from traveling People who operate a motor vehicle under the influence of marijuana would have their driver’s license revoked, even if they used the substance while overseas, the Ministry of Transportation and Communications said yesterday, citing proposed amendments to the Road Traffic Management and Penalty Act (道路交通管理處罰條例). The amendments would also authorize the government to revoke the licenses of people determined to have used Category 1 or Category 2 narcotics, even if they were not operating a vehicle while under the influence of drugs, as well as ban them from taking the license test for three years, the ministry said. People aged 18 or
GLOBALGIVING: ‘ Caving to external pressure is not acceptable for an organization that has cultivated justice reform and human rights for 30 years,’ one NGO said A slew of non-government organizations (NGOs) have withdrawn from the GlobalGiving fundraising platform after it announced it would use “Chinese Taipei” instead of “Taiwan” from next month. The Taiwan Good Rice Association wrote on Facebook on Friday that it was informed on April 28 via a teleconference call of the change, which was made because the platform wanted to operate in China. Taiwan Good Rice is to terminate all cooperative relationships with GlobalGiving in response to the platform’s “unilateral and non-negotiable” decision to remove references to Taiwan, the NGO said. “Taiwan is in the official name of Taiwan Good Rice Association and the
HEAVY WEATHER: Typhoon Jangmi is due to crash straight into the Ryukyus as airlines look to shift flights to larger aircraft or cancel flights to Okinawa entirely Taiwan’s international air carriers announced flight adjustments over the weekend as Typhoon Jangmi is forecast to hit the Ryukyu Islands today and tomorrow. The Central Weather Administration (CWA) upgraded Jangmi from a tropical storm to a typhoon at 8am yesterday, with the eye located 580km south of Naha city. It was moving north at 19kph. Today, China Airlines’ CI-120, CI-121, CI-122 and CI-123 flights between Taoyuan and Naha, Okinawa, have been canceled as well as CI-132 and CI-133 between Kaohsiung and Naha. EVA Air’s BR-112, BR-113, BR-186 and BR-185 flights between Taoyuan and Naha are also canceled. Low-cost carrier Tigerair Taiwan canceled IT-230,
MULTIPRONGED APPROACH: China has sought to pressure Palau across a number of fronts, but the island nation has staunchly resisted overtures to ditch Taiwan Palau has been firm in backing Taiwan despite Chinese pressure that uses tourism economics, cyberattacks and criminal infiltration as tools to threaten the Pacific ally into renouncing its recognition of Taiwan as a sovereign state. The Presidential Office yesterday announced that Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) would visit Palau from Saturday to Wednesday next week at the invitation of Palauan President Surangel Whipps Jr. Whipps in April said in an interview that China had outspokenly asked Palau to “denounce Taiwan.” “And we have said: ‘We have no enemies, but nobody tells us who our friends are,’” he said. Whipps has told reporters multiple times
RSS