Cross-strait relations are worse today than under former president Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration, former Mainland Affairs Council chairman Su Chi (蘇起) said on Tuesday.
Su, who also served as National Security Council secretary-general during former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) first term and is now chairman of the Taipei Forum think tank, told a forum in Taipei that cross-strait tensions under President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) are more strained than during the Chen years, due to the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) weakness.
During the Chen administration, the KMT acted as a counterbalance to the independence-leaning DPP, he said.
However, today’s weaker KMT has been unable to serve the same purpose, which could lead to deteriorating cross-strait ties, he said.
Relations between Taiwan and China can be described as the “three noes”: no trust, no communication and no buffer, he said.
While there has been concern over Tsai’s stance on the so-called “1992 consensus,” the term is not “that important,” he said, adding that “mutual trust” was the bigger issue in relations between the two sides.
The “1992 consensus” refers to a tacit understanding between the KMT and Beijing that both sides of the Taiwan Strait acknowledge there is “one China,” with each side having its own interpretation of what “China” means.
Su in 2006 said that he had made up the term in 2000 before Chen took office.
Although the KMT and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had the “1992 consensus” as a bridge, the key to better ties was the period from 2000 to 2005 that the two parties spent gradually establishing mutual trust, Su said.
The lack of a bridge of communication between the DPP government and the CCP reflects the lack of mutual trust, Su said.
Ties have cooled since Tsai took office on May 20 last year, mainly due to her refusal to heed Beijing’s calls to recognize the “1992 consensus” as the sole political foundation for cross-strait exchanges.
Taiwanese can file complaints with the Tourism Administration to report travel agencies if their activities caused termination of a person’s citizenship, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said yesterday, after a podcaster highlighted a case in which a person’s citizenship was canceled for receiving a single-use Chinese passport to enter Russia. The council is aware of incidents in which people who signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of Russia were told they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, Chiu told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Taipei. However, the travel agencies actually applied
Japanese footwear brand Onitsuka Tiger today issued a public apology and said it has suspended an employee amid allegations that the staff member discriminated against a Vietnamese customer at its Taipei 101 store. Posting on the social media platform Threads yesterday, a user said that an employee at the store said that “those shoes are very expensive” when her friend, who is a migrant worker from Vietnam, asked for assistance. The employee then ignored her until she asked again, to which she replied: "We don't have a size 37." The post had amassed nearly 26,000 likes and 916 comments as of this
New measures aimed at making Taiwan more attractive to foreign professionals came into effect this month, the National Development Council said yesterday. Among the changes, international students at Taiwanese universities would be able to work in Taiwan without a work permit in the two years after they graduate, explainer materials provided by the council said. In addition, foreign nationals who graduated from one of the world’s top 200 universities within the past five years can also apply for a two-year open work permit. Previously, those graduates would have needed to apply for a work permit using point-based criteria or have a Taiwanese company
The Shilin District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday indicted two Taiwanese and issued a wanted notice for Pete Liu (劉作虎), founder of Shenzhen-based smartphone manufacturer OnePlus Technology Co (萬普拉斯科技), for allegedly contravening the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例) by poaching 70 engineers in Taiwan. Liu allegedly traveled to Taiwan at the end of 2014 and met with a Taiwanese man surnamed Lin (林) to discuss establishing a mobile software research and development (R&D) team in Taiwan, prosecutors said. Without approval from the government, Lin, following Liu’s instructions, recruited more than 70 software
RSS