The Presidential Office yesterday criticized the Chinese-language United Daily News after it reported that US Senator Lindsey Graham had a business agenda when he visited Taiwan in the middle of this month.
The newspaper yesterday reported that Graham, the ranking member of the US Senate Budget Committee, was “forcefully” trying to convince the government to buy commercial airplanes made by US-based Boeing Co.
Graham led a congressional delegation to Taiwan on April 14 and 15, during which he met with President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) and other top government officials.
Photo: AP, courtesy of the Presidential Office
The report was based on two public statements by Graham.
During the delegation’s meeting with Tsai at the Presidential Office in Taipei on April 15, Graham said he hoped Taiwan would buy Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner jets.
The senator from South Carolina relayed this message again in a statement on Friday last week, saying: “I’m hoping in the coming weeks that Taiwan will announce that they’re going to buy 24 787 wide-body jets made by Boeing.”
“That would be a US$8 billion package,” he said. “It would be a tremendous boost to Boeing in South Carolina, and I’m hoping Taiwan will make that decision.”
Presidential Office spokesman Xavier Chang (張惇涵) yesterday said that the article did nothing good for Taiwan’s relationship with the US.
Separately, Department of North American Affairs Director-General Douglas Hsu (徐佑典) said that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs “deeply regrets” the report, as it distorted the senator’s comments and harmed Taiwan’s relationship with the US.
Graham’s remarks should be seen in the context of an elected representative seeking the best for his constituents, which is entirely normal in democracies, Hsu said.
The government applies a rigorous vetting process to foreign companies that intend to do business in Taiwan to protect the nation’s interests and the local economy, he said.
Taiwan and the US are close partners in matters of trade, and bilateral exchanges on goods and investments are important to the prosperity of the Indo-Pacific region, he said.
“The ministry calls on certain media firms to display the professionalism they are expected to have and to provide the public with factually correct information, instead of deliberately spreading untrue stories,” Hsu said.
Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Wang Ting-yu (王定宇) said the reason for the delegation’s visit to Taiwan was to improve the nation’s security following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, not to generate business for Boeing.
Lawmakers such as Graham should not be slammed for supporting their constituents’ livelihoods, just as Taiwanese lawmakers should not be criticized when they promote locally made products while abroad, Wang said.
“It would be absurd if [foreign] media reported that our lawmakers were forcing pineapples on their country,” 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
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
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