China’s opposition to the new US arms package for Taiwan is the equivalent of Beijing declaring that it has the right to “murder a democracy,” a security conference was told on Wednesday.
“For most Americans, that is highly offensive and threatening,” International Assessment and Strategy Center (IASC) senior fellow Richard Fisher said. “China’s insistence that it has the right to object would only increase our resolve.”
Addressing the Hudson Institute’s conference on security in the Pacific, which was held shortly before US President Barack Obama’s administration announced the latest arms sale to Taiwan, he said that Washington was increasing its appreciation of Taiwan’s value to US objectives in the region.
“Taiwan arms sales have always been a political football,” Fisher said.
He said that there had been a pattern of boom and bust, and of big arms packages separated by lengthy periods of “handwringing and indecision.”
Fisher predicted that China’s reaction to the new package would be “overblown” and that while there would be some penalty, it should not impact US decisionmaking.
If China were ever allowed to take over Taiwan, it would be a disaster not just for the people of Taiwan, but for Taiwan’s neighbors and very soon for the United States,” he said. “Having subdued one democracy, China would start taking on other democracies — Japan and the Philippines. Very quickly China would find itself in conflict with this democracy.”
He said that the four-year delay between the last US arms sale to Taiwan and this one could force the next White House administration to consider a more robust package.
That next package, might include real assistance with Taiwan’s indigenous submarine program and an offer of used F-16s if new aircraft were judged to be too expensive, Fisher said, adding that the US might help Taiwan build its own combat aircraft.
If that were to happen the US could provide a General Electric medium thrust turbo fan engine that could form the basis for “a very hot and effective combat aircraft,” Fisher 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
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
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