The nation’s special envoy to the APEC leadership summit, People First Party (PFP) Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜), is scheduled to meet with at least five national leaders attending the annual meeting, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said yesterday, declining to reveal the names.
In the buildup to the summit tomorrow and Saturday in Da Nang, Vietnam, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Lo Chih-cheng (羅致政) yesterday asked Minister of Foreign Affairs David Lee (李大維) to reveal what kind of arrangements the ministry have made for Soong.
“Given our nation’s special condition, we have arranged bilateral [leaders’] meetings with at least five nations,” Lee said at a meeting of the legislature’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, which was convened to review the results of President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) trip to three Pacific Ocean diplomatic allies.
Experience has shown that some nations are willing to disclose their leader’s meeting with Taiwan’s envoy, while others prefer to keep such a meeting secret, he would refrain from revealing the identities of the five nations out of respect.
Asked whether Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) was among the five, Lee said it was “inconvenient” for him to talk about the matter.
Lo asked whether any high-level officials from the Mainland Affairs Council and its Chinese counterpart, the Taiwan Affairs Office, would be accompanying Soong and Xi to the APEC summit.
“When [former vice president] Lien Chan (連戰) met with Chinese leaders in his capacity as the special envoy to APEC, both sides were in the company of high-level officials from the two government agencies charged with handling cross-strait issues,” Lo said.
Lee said to his knowledge, no high-ranking Mainland Affairs Council officials are in Soong’s delegation, adding that he has yet to receive any information regarding whether any Taiwan Affairs Office officials are in the Chinese delegation.
Lo then asked about the delay in Vietnam issuing a visa to Minister Without Portfolio John Deng (鄧振中), who is serving as the chief adviser and spokesman for the delegation.
Deng was unable to leave with the delegation on Tuesday due to a visa problem. He received the document late on Tuesday and departed for Vietnam at 7:40am yesterday.
“Except for the 2014 APEC summit in Shanghai, China, have any of our delegation members encountered difficulty in securing a visa before their scheduled departure?” Lo asked.
Lee acknowledged it was the first time, but declined to link the incident with a “third party” or Chinese pressure.
The ministry was given different reasons for the delay, but said there was no point in revealing them now that the problem has been resolved, Lee said.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift