Amid bickering between the Presidential Office and former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairman Lien Chan’s (連戰) office about Lien’s “one-China” comments, Vice President Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) yesterday defended Lien’s contribution to cross-strait relations.
Wu, in meeting with members of the Cross-Strait Business Development Foundation at the Presidential Office, said the path to the institutionalization of cross-strait negotiations has been a difficult and challenging one, and without Lien and other cross-strait experts in both the public and private sectors, the two sides of the Taiwan Strait would not be able to promote peaceful cross-strait relations.
“Chairman Lien’s trip to China in 2005 and his meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) helped the two sides to break the ice and launch a series of cross-strait exchanges,” Wu said.
Lien visited Beijing earlier this week for four days and met with Hu and Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping (習近平). When meeting with Xi, the former KMT chairman said that cross-strait relations should be based on the principles of “the ‘one China’ framework, cross-strait peace, mutual interest and integration, and the revitalization of the Zhonghua minzu (中華民族) [Chinese ethnic group].”
Lien’s “one China” remarks, as well as another comment that political negotiation is unavoidable for the two sides of the Taiwan Strait, raised concerns about the government moving toward unification, prompting the Presidential Office to immediately deny that Lien served as President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) messenger and that the comments represented the Ma administration’s cross-strait stance.
The Presidential Office’s response irritated Lien’s office director, Ting Yuan-chao (丁遠超), who insisted that Lien discussed his thoughts on cross-strait development in a meeting with Ma prior to his Beijing trip.
Presidential Office spokesperson Lee Chia-fei (李佳霏) yesterday shrugged off the criticism by Lien’s office and said that Ma did not ask Lien to give any messages to the Chinese leaders.
“What is certain is that chairman Lien, when discussing his Beijing trip with President Ma before meeting with Xi Jinping, did not mention the remarks he was going to make. President Ma also did not ask chairman Lien to deliver any message to the Chinese leaders,” she said.
Johanne Liou (劉喬安), a Taiwanese woman who shot to unwanted fame during the Sunflower movement protests in 2014, was arrested in Boston last month amid US President Donald Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigrants, the Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB) said yesterday. The arrest of Liou was first made public on the official Web site of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Tuesday. ICE said Liou was apprehended for overstaying her visa. The Boston Field Office’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) had arrested Liou, a “fugitive, criminal alien wanted for embezzlement, fraud and drug crimes in Taiwan,” ICE said. Liou was taken into custody
The US-Japan joint statement released on Friday not mentioning the “one China” policy might be a sign that US President Donald Trump intends to decouple US-China relations from Taiwan, a Taiwanese academic said. Following Trump’s meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba on Friday, the US and Japan issued a joint statement where they reaffirmed the importance of peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait and support for Taiwan’s meaningful participation in international organizations. Trump has not personally brought up the “one China” policy in more than a year, National Taiwan University Department of Political Science Associate Professor Chen Shih-min (陳世民)
‘NEVER!’ Taiwan FactCheck Center said it had only received donations from the Open Society Foundations, which supports nonprofits that promote democratic values Taiwan FactCheck Center (TFC) has never received any donation from the US Agency for International Development (USAID), a cofounder of the organization wrote on his Facebook page on Sunday. The Taipei-based organization was established in 2018 by Taiwan Media Watch Foundation and the Association of Quality Journalism to monitor and verify news and information accuracy. It was officially registered as a foundation in 2021. National Chung Cheng University communications professor Lo Shih-hung (羅世宏), a cofounder and chairman of TFC, was responding to online rumors that the TFC receives funding from the US government’s humanitarian assistance agency via the Open Society Foundations (OSF),
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