A former leader of the Tiananmen Square protests in China has lashed out at US presidential hopeful Donald Trump, whom he dubbed a “privileged comeback king” and warned that the US is at risk of abandoning its cherished freedoms.
Wuer Kaixi said he was speaking on behalf of Chinese democracy dissidents everywhere in condemning the provocative property magnate, who was criticized last week after describing the 1989 demonstration in Beijing as a “riot.”
“Speaking personally, after 27 years in exile from that ‘riot’ ... I think I can speak for all fellow exiled and imprisoned Chinese in condemning Trump,” Wuer Kaixi wrote on Facebook.
“I am not alone in appealing to the very same Americans who offered Chinese such as myself refuge when our own government deserted us to put aside partisan disputes and unite against Trump,” he said.
In a televised exchange, Republican frontrunner Trump was quizzed about his 1990 comments on the student-led protests and subsequent government crackdown that costs hundreds, possibly thousands of lives, in which he referred to “the power of strength.”
Speaking on CNN, Trump insisted he was not endorsing the Chinese Communist Party’s brutal response, which saw the military brought in to crush the protests.
“I said that is a strong, powerful government that put it down with strength,” he said. “And then they kept down the riot. It was a horrible thing. It doesn’t mean at all I was endorsing it.”
Wuer Kaixi lived in the US after fleeing China in the aftermath of the protests, but has resided in Taiwan for the past two decades.
He has tried to return to China on several occasions, but has been denied entry each time.
Beijing continues to block any activists advocating democratic reforms and Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) government has tightened its grip on the media.
“Politically, in China, nothing has changed — if anything it has become worse in recent years,” Wuer Kaixi said. “Trump, a privileged comeback king from a litany of failed fast-buck business scams, is an enemy of the values that America deeply defines itself by: the same values that have long provided hope to the victims of oppressive power worldwide.”
“Those of us who have fought for freedom anywhere in the world worry that something is about to change in America,” he wrote.
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