Believing in Beijing’s promises of peace and prosperity would cause the destruction of Taiwan as a sovereign nation, pro-Hong Kong advocates and human rights groups said in a joint statement on Monday, as they condemned the territory’s largest national security trial opening the day before.
The loss of the nation’s sovereignty would mean mass roundups of Taiwanese and the end of its formerly stable way of life, they said in a joint statement signed by the Taiwan Association of Human Rights, New School for Democracy and Hong Kong Outlanders, among others.
The 47 defendants in the national security trial include some of Hong Kong’s most prominent democracy advocates who were charged with subversion for holding an unofficial primary election. They face up to life in prison if convicted.
Photo: Reuters
As the most immediate target of China’s military buildup, Taiwan must support Hong Kong, which would affirm the nation’s commitment to the universal values of freedom and remind Taiwanese that Beijing’s olive branches often conceal poisonous thorns, the groups said.
It is alarming that a Beijing peace proposal based on its “one China” principle has returned to public discourse in Taiwan, they said, urging Taiwanese to learn from Hong Kong’s experience with communists and their “poisoned sugar pills.”
The groups said the Chinese Communist Party showed a complete disregard for the wishes of Hong Kongers when it rammed the National Security Law through the territory’s legislature.
The establishment of national security judges, abolition of jury trials and utilization of secret trials by Chinese authorities represent a systematic attack on Hong Kong’s legal institutions, the groups said.
Legal proceedings have devolved into nothing more than political drama staged to crush Hong Kongers’ will to resist, but many of the defendants have continued to defy the authorities by confronting the prosecutors in court, they 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