Beijing’s basic policy toward Taiwan is to remain unchanged despite political changes in Taiwan, a Chinese official said on Saturday.
“No matter what changes occur in Taiwan’s political scene, the mainland’s basic policy line toward Taiwan will not change,” China’s Taiwan Affairs Office Minister Zhang Zhijun (張志軍) said while meeting with a group of Taiwanese businesspeople with operations in China.
Zhang said he hoped that in the new year, cross-strait relations would continue to move forward along a path of peaceful development based on the common political foundation of the so-called “1992 consensus.”
He said that cross-strait ties have achieved fruitful results since 2008, a development which he said is beneficial to the wellbeing of people on both sides of the Strait and that should be valued.
It was the first time that Zhang has openly talked about cross-strait relations since the Jan. 16 elections in Taiwan, which saw the Democratic Progressive Party’s Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) win the presidency.
Tsai and her party have rejected the existence of the “1992 consensus,” which Taiwan’s incumbent Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government interprets as a tacit understanding reached during a meeting in Hong Kong in 1992 between Taiwanese and Chinese representatives, under which both sides claim to have acknowledged that there is “one China,” with each side having its own interpretation of what “one China” means.
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Taiwan is getting a day off on Christmas for the first time in 25 years. The change comes after opposition parties passed a law earlier this year to add or restore five public holidays, including Constitution Day, which falls on today, Dec. 25. The day marks the 1947 adoption of the constitution of the Republic of China, as the government in Taipei is formally known. Back then the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) governed China from Nanjing. When the KMT, now an opposition party in Taiwan, passed the legislation on holidays, it said that they would help “commemorate the history of national development.” That
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Snow fell on Yushan (Jade Mountain, 玉山) yesterday morning as a continental cold air mass sent temperatures below freezing on Taiwan’s tallest peak, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. Snowflakes were seen on Yushan’s north peak from 6:28am to 6:38am, but they did not fully cover the ground and no accumulation was recorded, the CWA said. As of 7:42am, the lowest temperature recorded across Taiwan was minus-5.5°C at Yushan’s Fengkou observatory and minus-4.7°C at the Yushan observatory, CWA data showed. On Hehuanshan (合歡山) in Nantou County, a low of 1.3°C was recorded at 6:39pm, when ice pellets fell at Songsyue Lodge (松雪樓), a
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