Rejecting Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) accusations that the nation’s leaders are “warmongers,” the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) yesterday said that the source of conflict is Beijing’s intimidation and threats that it would invade Taiwan.
DPP spokeswoman Hsieh Pei-fen (謝佩芬) reiterated the party’s core stance that “peace is the only choice,” and accused the KMT of being cowards for not daring to criticize China over its threats of going to war against Taiwan.
Hsieh was responding to KMT members labeling President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) and Vice President William Lai (賴清德), the DPP’s candidate for next year’s presidential election, as “warmongers” who are provoking a military conflict with China.
Photo: CNA
“KMT members are conspiring with Beijing, using talk of war to intimidate Taiwanese. They are trying to force the public to accept its ‘one China’ principle, with its pretense of peace, and falsely portraying the upcoming elections as a choice between war and peace,” she said.
The KMT is obscuring the real issue by kowtowing to China and accepting its “one China” principle and the so-called “1992 consensus” — both of which the KMT’s presidential candidate — New Taipei City Mayor Hou You-yi (侯友宜) — dared not deny.
“We all know that China is the main reason for the instability and potential military conflict in the region — and not the DPP government,” she said.
She said that a statement issued at the G7 leaders’ meeting in Hiroshima, Japan, called for a “peaceful resolution” of China’s claim to Taiwan.
The statement also expressed serious concern that “Beijing has been expanding its military presence and threatening to use force to exert its control” over Taiwan, that “there was no legal basis for China’s expansive maritime claims in the South China Sea” and that they “oppose China’s militarization activities in the region.”
“It is regrettable that the KMT, although based in Taiwan, is afraid to face reality. It only makes false accusations to smear the DPP, but does not have the guts to criticize Beijing,” she said.
At a news briefing earlier yesterday at KMT headquarters, KMT Legislator Lee De-wei (李德維) said the presidential election is a choice between war and peace, with the DPP gunning for war, while the KMT stands for peace.
During the KMT’s administration, “when Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) was the president, we had very warm relations and good interactions with China. There was no fear then of war breaking out and young people did not have to contend with a longer mandatory military service,” he said.
KMT deputy secretary-general Lee Yen-hsiu (李彥秀) claimed that Tsai and Lai had previously spoken of the “inevitability of war” to scare the public and thereby extend military service to one year.
“Tsai and Lai are peddling war, profiting on the public’s fear,” he said.
Political scientist Wang Hung-jen (王宏仁) of National Cheng Kung University said that it is natural that people would choose peace over war, which is why the KMT has been focusing its campaign on this issue.
“The KMT is framing the upcoming elections as a choice between war and peace to mislead the public. It is implying that a vote for the DPP would be a vote for war, while a vote for the KMT would be a vote for peace. But this is erroneous as no political party or country would want war — even the US,” he said.
“The real issue is that you have no choice in war, that it could be imposed from the outside, just like Russia invading Ukraine,” he added.
“Taiwan has bolstered its national defense, working to reform the armed forces and has an ongoing military cooperation with US. All these are concrete plans to prevent war,” he said. “The KMT has repeatedly accused the ruling party of provoking China, but it cannot show any concrete example of the [DPP] doing so.”
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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:
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
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