US Representative Michael McCaul on Thursday said that China sanctioning him following his visit to Taiwan was a “badge of honor.”
China announced the sanctions on Wednesday, barring McCaul from getting a visa or entering the country, freezing any property he might have there, and prohibiting people and organizations there from doing business with him.
The sanctions were imposed after McCaul, who chairs the US House of Representatives’ Committee on Foreign Affairs, led an eight-member delegation on a visit to Taiwan from Thursday to Saturday last week, during which he met with President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), Vice President William Lai (賴清德), Legislative Speaker You Si-kun and executives of Taiwanese semiconductor companies.
Photo: AP / Presidential Office
In a statement on Thursday, McCaul said the sanctions had served only to highlight current geopolitical issues and the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) pugnacity.
“Ironically, this baseless action serves US interests by bringing more attention to our international partners and revealing the CCP’s blatant aggression,” McCaul said.
“Being sanctioned by the Chinese Communist Party is a badge of honor,” he said. “Nothing will deter the United States from supporting free, democratic nations — including Taiwan.”
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS