Former vice president Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) yesterday said that Beijing, “if wise,” would want to maintain the so-called “1992 consensus” as there is no point of taking Taiwan by force, which would cost billions of dollars and incite Taiwanese hatred.
In a radio interview with Clara Chou (周玉蔻), Wu was asked whether he has received any calls from Beijing inquiring about his Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairmanship bid, “like former KMT vice chairman Steve Chan (詹啟賢) said he had.”
Chou was referring to Chan’s revelation on Monday last week — before he announced his candidacy for KMT chairman in the May 20 election — that China’s Taiwan Affairs Office had wanted to know whether he planned to vie for the post.
Photo: Huang Yao-cheng, Taipei Times
Wu said he does not know whether Beijing has concerns about the KMT election.
“I did not ask and it is not appropriate for me to ask either,” Wu said, adding that the election is an intraparty affair.
Asked whether he thinks Beijing would prefer a candidate who is more “unification-oriented” and supports “one China, same interpretation,” the former vice president said that “with enough wisdom, Beijing would definitely want to keep ‘one China, different interpretations,’ and maintain a peaceful and stable cross-strait relationship.”
“There is no point waging war on Taiwan. Even if China were to successfully take Taiwan by force, it would probably cost 30 trillion to 50 trillion US dollars to rebuild and it would pay dearly for the public hatred it had incited, but Beijing might not be able to put up with what it cannot put up with,” Wu said. “When the floodwater comes up to your nose, you would probably take some action.”
While Wu did not specify what it was Beijing would not put up with, Chou suggested that it would be declaring Taiwan independent.
“So the best approach is the 1992 consensus with ‘one China, different interpretations,’” Wu said.
With five aspirants, including Wu, having announced their bids, Chou asked whether Wu would be deprived of votes as “young party members might vote for Taipei Agricultural Products Marketing Corp president Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜), the old ones could support Chairwoman Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱), KMT Vice Chairman Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) has the backing of his father, former premier Hau Pei-tsun (郝柏村), and Chan would attract the party’s local faction.”
Wu said he would receive votes from “all the above-mentioned groups.”
Separately yesterday, Hung alleged that Chan told her that he would run for chairman when he tendered his resignation on Jan. 7, an allegation that Chan denied.
In a separate radio interview, Chan said he did not quit in order to run for KMT chairman and that he did indeed hold a different view about how to deal with the party’s assets than other KMT officials, but that was “not the only reason I resigned.”
Chan said before he announced his resignation he felt “discontented and puzzled” after Hung told reporters that “nobody supported the signing of an administrative contract with the Ill-gotten Party Assets Settlement Committee except Chan,” when he had Hung’s authorization to negotiate with the committee.
It was reported that the committee and Chan, representing the KMT, had agreed to sign an administrative contract that would allow the handover of the party’s shares in Central Investment Co and its subsidiary, Hsinyutai Co, to the state, even though 45 percent of the shares would have to be transferred in the form of a donation.
The contract also had provisions concerning what would be done with the funds garnered from the disposal of Central Investment Co’s assets.
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