China has assumed an even more overbearing manner aimed at undermining the morale of Taiwanese and disrupting society, but Taiwan will not yield an inch, no matter how great the pressure, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) said yesterday.
Tsai, who is also chair of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), made the comment as she campaigned in Tainan for mayoral candidate Huang Wei-che (黃偉哲) and the party’s city councilor candidates.
Speaking to about 1,000 DPP supporters, Tsai enumerated her administration’s domestic achievements and said that the government has not let everyone down, even under very difficult circumstances caused by China’s efforts to suppress Taiwan.
“We all see that China has become more overbearing recently,” Tsai said, citing its demand that international airlines list Taiwanese airports as being in China, its pressuring of the East Asian Olympic Committee during a meeting in Beijing to withdraw Taichung’s right to host the first East Asian Youth Games, and its pressure on Taiwanese actress Vivian Sung (宋芸樺) to apologize for saying Taiwan is her favorite nation.
However hard China has tried to pressure Taiwan, her administration has stood steadfast, the president said, adding that her handling of the situation has won Taiwan support from the international community.
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