President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) yesterday poured cold water on US hopes for better cross-strait relations after next year's presidential elections when he said Taiwan and China would never resume negotiations if Beijing refused to abandon its "one China" policy.
Chen said that while he welcomed most of American Institute in Taiwan Chairman Stephen Young's speech before the Foundation on International and Cross-Strait Studies (FICS) Conference on Monday, he disagreed with Young on several issues, including his interpretation of Chinese President Hu Jintao's (
Chen said he did not think Hu's comments indicated that Beijing was looking for ways to open contact with Taiwan's next president as it had long suspended cross-strait talks during the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regime, which recognizes the "one China" policy.
"How do you expect Beijing to sit down and talk with the Democratic Progressive Party [DPP])?" he said. "To expect China to put aside differences with Taiwan is like `catching fish in a tree.' I personally do not think both sides will resume negotiations even with a new president next year."
This could change, though, if China were willing to relinquish its "one China" policy and goal of ultimate unificatio, the president said.
Chen made the remarks while receiving a US delegation led by former AIT chairman Richard Bush at the Presidential Office yesterday afternoon.
Chen said that the best part of Young's speech was that "China's democratization may turn out to be the single most important prerequisite for seeking a resolution of the Taiwan question that is acceptable to both sides."
"A better way to say it is that China's democratization is indeed the single most important prerequisite for seeking a resolution of the Taiwan question that is acceptable to both sides," Chen said.
On the US government's opposition to the DPP administration's referendum proposal seeking UN membership under the name "Taiwan," Chen said the referendum was a democratic way to send a clear message to China that Taiwanese do not want to be a part of the People's Republic of China.
"To put it more directly, it is a referendum seeking to reject unification," he said.
Chen also dismissed Young's criticism that the referendum was inconsistent with the spirit of his public commitment to maintain the status quo in the Taiwan Strait.
GREAT POWER COMPETITION: Beijing views its military cooperation with Russia as a means to push back against the joint power of the US and its allies, an expert said A recent Sino-Russian joint air patrol conducted over the waters off Alaska was designed to counter the US military in the Pacific and demonstrated improved interoperability between Beijing’s and Moscow’s forces, a national security expert said. National Defense University associate professor Chen Yu-chen (陳育正) made the comment in an article published on Wednesday on the Web site of the Journal of the Chinese Communist Studies Institute. China and Russia sent four strategic bombers to patrol the waters of the northern Pacific and Bering Strait near Alaska in late June, one month after the two nations sent a combined flotilla of four warships
‘LEADERS’: The report highlighted C.C. Wei’s management at TSMC, Lisa Su’s decisionmaking at AMD and the ‘rock star’ status of Nvidia’s Huang Time magazine on Thursday announced its list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence (AI), which included Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) chairman and chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家), Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) and AMD chair and CEO Lisa Su (蘇姿丰). The list is divided into four categories: Leaders, Innovators, Shapers and Thinkers. Wei and Huang were named in the Leaders category. Other notable figures in the Leaders category included Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Meta CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Su was listed in the Innovators category. Time highlighted Wei’s
EVERYONE’S ISSUE: Kim said that during a visit to Taiwan, she asked what would happen if China attacked, and was told that the global economy would shut down Taiwan is critical to the global economy, and its defense is a “here and now” issue, US Representative Young Kim said during a roundtable talk on Taiwan-US relations on Friday. Kim, who serves on the US House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee, held a roundtable talk titled “Global Ties, Local Impact: Why Taiwan Matters for California,” at Santiago Canyon College in Orange County, California. “Despite its small size and long distance from us, Taiwan’s cultural and economic importance is felt across our communities,” Kim said during her opening remarks. Stanford University researcher and lecturer Lanhee Chen (陳仁宜), lawyer Lin Ching-chi
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) was wooing leaders from across Africa with a banquet on Wednesday night, King Mswati III of Eswatini was notably absent. That is because the kingdom — about the size of New Jersey and with just 1.2 million people — is one of Taiwan’s remaining dozen diplomatic allies. That means Eswatini does not participate in Xi’s Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, the centerpiece of China’s diplomatic outreach to Africa, which was held in Beijing this week. The landlocked nation, which sits between Mozambique and South Africa, is the last holdout in Beijing’s seven-plus decade mission to make Africa
RSS