The pro-unification New Party yesterday sought to distance itself from Chinese academic Li Yi (李毅), who was on Friday last week deported from Taiwan for supporting “unification by force,” by saying it pursues peaceful unification.
New Party Deputy Chairman Lee Sheng-feng (李勝峰) made the remarks after Li delivered a short speech via video at a party forum in Taoyuan to discuss how Taiwan should respond to Beijing’s unification agenda.
Li’s video speech was a workaround after his deportation to China prevented him from speaking at a pro-unification parade that the Association for China’s Peaceful Unification had planned to have the following day.
The association said it canceled the parade to ensure “social order” and the safety of the participants.
Asked to elaborate on his purported support for “unification by force,” Li said what he actually advocates is unification through “threats of force.”
“In Taiwan, only 10 out of every 100 people support unification and they are people like [members of] the New Party, the China Unification Promotion Party and former Chinese Nationalist Party [KMT] chairwoman Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱),” Li said. “None of you stand a chance of being elected as a lawmaker, a local government head or a [national] leader.”
Li said that if the trend continues, the majority of Taiwanese aged 60 and younger would be “independence-leaning” 20 years from now, and the chance of achieving peaceful unification would be almost impossible.
As Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) has stated that the Taiwan issue cannot be delayed indefinitely, Li said the most possible scenario would be for Beijing to threaten the use of force to browbeat the Taiwanese government into signing a peace agreement and accepting peaceful unification.
However, Lee said that Li’s opinions only refelect his own position and not that of the New Party, adding that his party does not support the idea of using threats to force unification.
“[Such an idea] would not be accepted by Taiwanese society and frankly, the situation has not deteriorated to that point yet,” Lee said, adding that even Beijing’s use of force is conditional.
Lee said that it would be inaccurate to brand all of the younger generation as “independence-leaning,” saying that a more correct term would be “Taiwan-leaning.”
“They grew up in Taiwan and identify themselves as Taiwanese, but that is a completely different story from wanting to achieve independence,” he said.
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