The brief meeting between People First Party (PFP) Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜) and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) during the APEC leaders’ summit Lima, Peru, shows that Beijing and Taipei hope to deal with each other calmly and rationally and that cross-strait relations are “not so bad,” a Chinese academic said.
The meeting did show that cross-strait relations are worse than they were during former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration, said Liu Guosheng (劉國深), head of the Taiwan Research Institute at Xiamen University in China.
Soong, who served as President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) envoy to the summit, talked with Xi before the two men took part in dialogue between APEC leaders and the APEC Business Advisory Council on Saturday.
As Soong has been on good terms with Chinese leaders, Xi’s willingness to talk with him for 10 minutes in a “chance encounter” showed “deep meaning,” demonstrating that person-to-person relationships could play a key role and that setting up dialogue channels between the two sides is very important, Liu said.
Beijing not boycotting Soong’s attendance at the APEC summit shows that both Beijing and Taipei hope to deal with each other calmly and rationally and that cross-strait relations are “not so bad,” Liu said.
Soong told Xi that he hoped Beijing would not change the direction of cross-strait trade and economic exchanges and take care of Taiwanese small and medium-sized enterprises.
The Taiwanese and Chinese delegations agreed to release individual statements about the meeting, but no photographs, said PFP Legislator Lee Hung-chun (李鴻鈞), who traveled to the APEC summit as an adviser to the Taiwanese delegation.
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:
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