Beijing is nervous about Taiwan’s Jan. 16 presidential election because it recognizes that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) could win, a former US Department of State official said last week.
“Beijing is obviously nervous about the prospect of the victory of the DPP,” said Evans Revere, who served as principal US deputy assistant secretary and acting assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific Affairs before retiring from the department in 2007.
He made the comment in response to a question during an interview with the Central News Agency.
The latest polls show DPP Chairwoman Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) leading in a three-person race against the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) candidate, Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱), and People First Party Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜), who on Thursday said he would enter the race.
Beijing has made it clear over the years that it has “fundamental disagreements” with the DPP, Revere said.
Tsai “has been very careful and very precise in her rhetoric and I am hoping that Beijing will listen very carefully to what she has said and what she has not said in this campaign,” he added.
During a 12-day trip to the US earlier this summer, Tsai said that, if elected president, she would continue to promote cross-strait peace and stability under the Constitution.
Irrespective of the outcome of the election, it would be “a victory for democracy in Taiwan,” Revere said.
He also said that he hoped Beijing would respect the voice of the Taiwanese and understand that there would be opportunities to build on the achievements made in cross-strait relations over the past few years.
“There will be a strong desire to maintain the accomplishments in cross-strait relations,” regardless of the outcome of the election, he said.
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:
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
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
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater