For Taiwan to increase its international participation, it must adhere to shared global values, as well as create strategic values “needed” by the international community, Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Lo Chih-cheng (羅致政) said yesterday.
Speaking at the annual meeting of the Taiwan United Nations Alliance — a non-governmental organization promoting UN membership for Taiwan — in Taipei yesterday, Lo said that while no one would deny Taiwan is a nation, it still has to work hard to be recognized by more countries as a “sovereign nation.”
“Being a sovereign nation comes with rights and responsibilities. It is just like the difference between a person and a citizen, every human is born a person, but only those recognized by law, who enjoy certain privileges and shoulder certain responsibilities, are citizens,” Lo said.
Photo: Liu Hsin-de, Taipei Times
For Taiwan to be recognized as a sovereign nation, it should adhere to values shared by other sovereign nations, such as freedoms, human rights and environmental protection, he said.
“Adherence to shared values is not sufficient. Taiwan must also make other nations feel that recognizing Taiwan is in line with their national interests, because diplomacy is all about exchange of interests,” Lo said.
“Instead of chanting slogans, the nation should think about how to increase its strategic status in the international community so that other countries need Taiwan,” Lo said. “The nation should create its values economically, diplomatically and militarily.”
New Power Party Legislator Freddy Lim (林昶佐) accused the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government of “diplomatic idling” in the past eight years.
He said, for instance, fishing vessels from Taiwan regularly work in waters near more than a dozen nations in Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Indian, Pacific and Atlantic oceans, “but so far, Taiwan has only signed fisheries agreements with two countries, the Philippines and Japan, and did so only after conflicts and disputes.”
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