Beijing’s behavior was “out of control,” the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) said yesterday after a Taiwanese-Spanish academic said that China’s embassy in Spain pressured the University of Salamanca to cancel a Taiwanese culture event.
“Today I decided to go public with the email #China’s embassy in Spain sent to coerce the University of #Salamanca into cancelling “#Taiwan Cultural Days” on October 2017,” Shiany Perez-Cheng (鄭夏霓) tweeted late on Saturday.
Perez-Chen is a professor of international relations at the university and a leading organizer of the university’s Taiwan Culture Day.
Photo from Shiany Perez-Cheng’s Twitter account
A letter attached to the tweet that Perez-Chen said was an English-language version of the embassy’s e-mail said: “Inviting to [sic] the so-called ‘Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs of Taiwan’ to lecture causes confusion and misunderstanding about the Taiwan problem.”
“There are many incorrect expressions in the cultural days’ program and in the promotional materials,” it said. “Those arguments do not fall in line with the Spanish government, who has long followed the ‘one China principle.’”
“We wouldn’t like your institution to be used by Taiwanese authorities as a platform for its political agenda, it would affect the university’s good relations with China,” it said.
The letter demanded that the university accept the “one China” principle and take measures to “avoid and eliminate the adverse effects.”
The defilement of a storied European university is the latest instance of China’s continued persecution of Taiwan, the ministry said in a statement.
Beijing’s hinderance of Taiwanese participation in free academic and cultural exchanges is “barbaric,” the ministry said, adding that the government was dismayed and angered.
Beijing’s all-out effort to squeeze Taiwan’s international space, instead of achieving “the union of souls across the [Taiwan] Strait” touted by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in March, would serve only to invite the “anger and even scorn for China of the Taiwanese,” the ministry said.
Taiwan is projected to lose a working-age population of about 6.67 million people in two waves of retirement in the coming years, as the nation confronts accelerating demographic decline and a shortage of younger workers to take their place, the Ministry of the Interior said. Taiwan experienced its largest baby boom between 1958 and 1966, when the population grew by 3.78 million, followed by a second surge of 2.89 million between 1976 and 1982, ministry data showed. In 2023, the first of those baby boom generations — those born in the late 1950s and early 1960s — began to enter retirement, triggering
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