President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) has pledged that her administration would neither succumb to Chinese pressure nor lower its level of goodwill toward Beijing, urging Taiwan’s increasingly hostile neighbor to return to the calm and rationality it demonstrated for a short period after her inauguration.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal in Taipei on Tuesday, Tsai said her May 20 inaugural address — which China has described as an “incomplete test” — was an embodiment of her “maximum benevolence and flexibility.”
“Following May 20, we saw Beijing demonstrate a certain level of composure and rationality… For a period of time we also witnessed some acts of kindness from China,” Tsai said.
However, Tsai said that Taiwan’s exclusion from this year’s International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Assembly in Canada and its treatment of Taiwanese with different political stances as a sign that Beijing has decided to return to its tactics of suppression and division.
Despite the shift in Beijing’s attitude, Tsai, who is facing renewed pressure to acknowledge the so-called “1992 consensus” ahead of her Double Ten National Day speech, vowed to honor her pledge to maintain the “status quo.”
“This promise will remain unchanged, so is our goodwill, but we will not bow to pressure. We do not want to, nor are we willing to, go down the old path of confrontation,” Tsai said, calling for a cross-strait dialogue to resolve unnecessary misunderstandings.
Urging China not to misjudge the current situation and mistakenly think that pressure could bring Taiwanese to their knees, the president said such pressure is shouldered by the people as a whole and that her administration would by no means act against mainstream public opinion.
The “1992 consensus” refers to a tacit understanding between the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Beijing that both sides of the Taiwan Strait acknowledge there is “one China,” with each side having its own interpretation of what “China” means. Former Mainland Affairs Council chairman Su Chi (蘇起) said in 2006 that he had made up the term in 2000.
Tsai’s refusal to accept the “1992 consensus” has resulted in punitive actions from China, including suspending official cross-strait communication mechanisms, squeezing Taiwan’s international space and reducing the number of Chinese tourists allowed to visit Taiwan.
On Taiwan’s economic dependence on China, Tsai said that as Taipei’s and Beijing’s economies have become more competitive than mutually beneficial, she intends to push for industrial transformation and establish economic relations with South and Southeast Asia.
Tsai has been relatively optimistic about the development of the local tourism sector, saying that despite the drop in Chinese tourists, the number of visitors from other regions has increased this year.
“The important thing is that we must offer some assistance to tourism proprietors that have been dependent on Chinese tourists, allowing them to make necessary adjustments and provide services to tourists from other countries,” she said.
Asked whether she would be willing to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), Tsai said while she thinks positively about the idea of meeting with Xi, setting political preconditions for such dialogues would hinder cross-strait ties.
“Beijing has always been of the opinion that any meaningful negotiations across the Taiwan Strait cannot occur before its preconditions are satisfied. This kind of political constraint obstructs the development of our bilateral relations,” Tsai said.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) held an unprecedented meeting with Xi in Singapore in November last year, the first of its kind since the KMT retreat to Taiwan in 1949 following its defeat in the Chinese Civil War.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS