President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) is to embark on a trip to the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Nicaragua on Saturday next week, with a hope of visiting his alma mater, Harvard University, during a transit stop in Boston, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Simon Ko (柯森耀) said yesterday.
Ko unveiled Ma’s planned itinerary for the nation’s three allies in the Caribbean and Central America at a news conference held at the Presidential Office Building.
The delegation of 85 to be led by Ma and include National Security Council Secretary-General Kao Hua-chu (高華柱), legislators and business leaders is to make a transit stop in Boston on its way to Central America, and in Los Angeles on the way back, Ko said.
Ma is expected to arrive in the Dominican Republic on July 12, where he is to deliver a speech at the National Congress before traveling to Haiti on July 14 and Nicaragua the following day to enhance relations with the allies, Ko said.
In response to reporters’ questions that Ma would reportedly attend a closed-door meeting at Harvard, Ko said details of his itinerary “are still being worked out.”
“Everyone naturally associates the trip with Harvard University because President Ma had studied at the university and that is what the ministry has been working on with the US, but all the details are still being negotiated,” Ko said.
Meanwhile, Ko said that Deputy Legislative Speaker Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱), the presumptive candidate of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), would not be in the entourage.
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:
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