Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) yesterday fueled uncertainty over his party’s planned forum with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), saying he would not attend the annual meeting unless both parties could agree on an agenda.
Wu made the remarks on the sidelines of a get-together with members of the KMT’s Huang Fu-hsing (黃復興) military veterans branch in Taipei yesterday, about a week after the party announced that this year’s KMT-CCP forum has been scheduled for next month in China.
“[My attendance] hinges on the achievement of a general consensus between the two sides on the agenda and discussion topics. I also hope that preliminary conclusions could be reached beforehand,” Wu said.
“If I went and ended up walking away empty-handed, why should I bother to make the trip?” he said.
The consensuses he hopes to achieve with Beijing are ones that are conducive to the peaceful and stable development of cross-strait relations, which could help the government break the current stalemate across the Taiwan Strait, he said.
“Unless these preconditions are met, I will not arrange to travel to China,” Wu added.
According to a statement issued by the KMT on Tuesday last week, this year’s forum is to focus on issues concerning China-based Taiwanese businesspeople, as well as Chinese tourists and students visiting Taiwan.
The KMT-CCP forums began in 2006, when the Democratic Progressive Party was in power, and a year after former vice president and then-KMT chairman Lien Chan (連戰) visited China in April 2005.
It was originally called the Cross-Strait Economic, Trade and Culture Forum, but in November 2016 then-KMT chairwoman Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱) changed the name to the Cross-Strait Peaceful Development Forum “in response to the new situations across the Taiwan Strait.”
If Wu attends, it would be the first such forum he has participated in since taking over the KMT in August last year.
There is also the possibility of him meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), as his predecessors, New Taipei City Mayor Eric Chu (朱立倫) and Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱) did in 2015 and 2016 respectively.
However, as a former vice president, Wu is required by the Classified National Security Information Protection Act (國家機密保護法) to apply for permission from the government to travel overseas in the first three years after leaving office.
Considering that most countries issue more than five denominations of banknotes, the central bank has decided to redesign all five denominations, the bank said as it prepares for the first major overhaul of the banknotes in more than 24 years. Central bank Governor Yang Chin-lung (楊金龍) is expected to report to the Legislative Yuan today on the bank’s operations and the redesign’s progress. The bank in a report sent to the legislature ahead of today’s meeting said it had commissioned a survey on the public’s preferences. Survey results showed that NT$100 and NT$1,000 banknotes are the most commonly used, while NT$200 and NT$2,000
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) is suspending retaliation measures against South Korea that were set to take effect tomorrow, after Seoul said it is updating its e-arrival system, MOFA said today. The measures were to be a new round of retaliation after Taiwan on March 1 changed South Korea's designation on government-issued alien resident certificates held by South Korean nationals to "South Korea” from the "Republic of Korea," the country’s official name. The move came after months of protests to Seoul over its listing of Taiwan as "China (Taiwan)" in dropdown menus on its new online immigration entry system. MOFA last week
RSS