Wuer Kaixi yesterday castigated Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) Minister Wang Yu-chi’s (王郁琦) post-election praise for the so-called “1992 consensus,” calling it “a semantic contradiction” when the “consensus” is of “different interpretations.”
Wang, in response to Taipei mayor-elect Ko Wen-je’s (柯文哲) calling the “consensus” outdated, panned Ko for “commenting on something of which he has little understanding” and said that the consensus has allowed President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration to make progress in the cross-strait relationship development since 2008.
Wuer Kaixi — a student leader in China’s 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests and now a Taiwanese citizen who announced his candidacy for next year’s legislative by-election in Greater Taichung earlier this month — slammed Wang’s acclaim for the “consensus,” calling it a lie that has lingered for 22 years.
“There is no ‘consensus’ that is for each side to ‘each have their own respective interpretation.’ This is a semantic contradiction. The consensus of the ‘1992 consensus’ is that there is no such consensus,” he said.
The KMT has touted the “creative ambiguity” of the alleged agreement, “but vagueness is exactly what the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) wants. Why? The CCP is exactly the one who does not dare to touch on the issue of [Taiwan’s] sovereignty. The CCP would have to say that ‘one China’ represents the People’s Republic of China if clarity presides. Does it dare to say that to Taiwanese? And who is it that has been playing along with the CCP?” Wuer Kaixi said.
“When the social consensus has expressed through social movements its distrust of the CCP, the vagueness does not fare well for Taiwan,” he said. “So if I am elected as a legislator, I will promote an open and public attitude toward the ‘one China’ problem. As a democratic nation, Taiwan has nothing to fear.”
When asked whether he then supports the Taiwanese independence movement, Wuer Kaixi said it is undeniable that Taiwan, as the Republic of China, is an independent sovereign.
“There is no question of independence; there is only the question of ‘unification,’” he said.
A change to the nation’s official name from Republic of China to Taiwan would be a “small problem” which could be altered via a referendum, he said.
“The substantive problem involves sovereignty. And the international community should respect that Taiwan is an independent sovereign,” he added.
Yang Sen-hong (楊憲宏), chairman of the Taiwan Association for China Human Rights, who hosted the news conference for Wuer Kaixi, seconded the opinion, insofar as the consensus was — as the name indicates — reached in 1992, when Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) was president.
“Ma needs to stop his self-deception when Lee has already announced that there is no such thing as the ‘1992 consensus,’” Yang said.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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:
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
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