The Chinese government could make itself an “international joke” by discouraging its citizens from enrolling in Taiwanese universities, New Power Party (NPP) Legislator Hsu Yung-ming (徐永明) said on Saturday.
Hsu was responding to allegations made on Friday that the Chinese Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) had denied travel documents to a Chinese student who was to attend National Cheng Kung University on the grounds that the university supports Taiwanese independence.
“Although China is a great nation, it is terrified by Taiwan’s flourishing intellectual diversity and had to obstruct its people from coming. I urge the Chinese communist regime to restrain its fears, lest it become an international joke,” Hsu said on Facebook.
As an open and tolerant society, Taiwan has never been the one to obstruct free exchanges between Taiwan and China, Hsu said.
“The Chinese government’s narrow-mindedness and lack of self-confidence has been thoroughly revealed by its attempt to stop students from studying in Taiwan. I believe it is not Taiwanese independence that Beijing is afraid of. Rather, it is our democracy and free way of life that Beijing considers an existential threat. The communist government is afraid that once young Chinese are exposed to democracy, they will question the regime and shake the foundations of its rule,” he said.
Beijing’s concern that even one university student will threaten its existence is a sign that the regime is “rotten to the core and its need for reforms is dire,” he said, calling on the Chinese government to “stop bullying young students.”
When asked to comment, TAO spokesman Ma Xiaoguang (馬曉光) did not deny allegations that his office is barring Chinese students from attending Taiwanese universities, adding that the TAO was “doing its job.”
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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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