Former Legislative Yuan speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) is scheduled to meet with China’s Taiwan Affairs Office Director Song Tao (宋濤) today in Xiamen as part of his ancestor-worshiping tour in China’s Fujian Province.
Wang departed for China yesterday.
Wang and former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) are attempting to find ways to interact with China to defuse rising tensions and avoid a war between the two countries, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus deputy chief secretary Wang Hong-wei (王鴻薇) said yesterday.
Photo: Tu Chien-jung, Taipei Times
If the Taipei-Shanghai City Forum can be successfully held by the end of this year, it would help to build the solid foundation for peace that people across the Taiwan Strait have been hoping for, she said.
Wang Jin-pyng established a think tank on Wednesday called the “Middle Way Peace Alliance” (中道和平聯盟智庫), while Ma’s foundation invited a group of Chinese students to visit Taiwan, who are expected to arrive on Wednesday next week, she said.
During a lunch hosted by his think tank on Wednesday, Wang Jin-pyng said he would spend his twilight years building a more harmonious political atmosphere domestically and contributing to cross-strait peace, adding that the think tank would recruit members across party lines to help him achieve those goals.
“Everybody hopes for cross-strait peace. Taiwan has bought NT$20 billion [US$650 million] of military equipment from the US, which has yet to delivered, and US president-elect Donald Trump is filling his would-be Cabinet positions with anti-China hawks. The cross-strait tension would only rise,” KMT Legislator Lai Shyh-bao (賴士葆) said.
Wang Jin-pyng’s appeal to unite Taiwan, contribute to cross-strait peace and facilitate reconciliation between the ruling and opposition parties is a good start, Lai said.
“We are facing a precarious international situation, and each of us should ask ourselves how we can contribute,” KMT Legislator Hsieh Long-jie (謝龍介) said, adding that the government’s national security team should spend more time thinking about ways to create peace and dialogue.
NATIONAL SECURITY: Authorities are working to confirm the identities of the military personnel involved and investigating possible illegal conduct and regulatory violations Authorities are probing possible national security implications after Kinmen police and immigration officers on Sunday found a Chinese woman allegedly posing as a tourist while engaging in prostitution involving more than 10 military personnel. The woman, surnamed Chen (陳), has since been deported, authorities said, adding that investigators are still working to confirm the identities of those implicated, as the records only listed code names and aliases. The case stemmed from a report received by the Kinmen District Prosecutors’ Office on Friday last week from the Jinhu Precinct of the Kinmen County Police Bureau. On Sunday, police, along with the National Immigration
GLOBALGIVING: ‘ Caving to external pressure is not acceptable for an organization that has cultivated justice reform and human rights for 30 years,’ one NGO said A slew of non-government organizations (NGOs) have withdrawn from the GlobalGiving fundraising platform after it announced it would use “Chinese Taipei” instead of “Taiwan” from next month. The Taiwan Good Rice Association wrote on Facebook on Friday that it was informed on April 28 via a teleconference call of the change, which was made because the platform wanted to operate in China. Taiwan Good Rice is to terminate all cooperative relationships with GlobalGiving in response to the platform’s “unilateral and non-negotiable” decision to remove references to Taiwan, the NGO said. “Taiwan is in the official name of Taiwan Good Rice Association and the
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MULTIPRONGED APPROACH: China has sought to pressure Palau across a number of fronts, but the island nation has staunchly resisted overtures to ditch Taiwan Palau has been firm in backing Taiwan despite Chinese pressure that uses tourism economics, cyberattacks and criminal infiltration as tools to threaten the Pacific ally into renouncing its recognition of Taiwan as a sovereign state. The Presidential Office yesterday announced that Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) would visit Palau from Saturday to Wednesday next week at the invitation of Palauan President Surangel Whipps Jr. Whipps in April said in an interview that China had outspokenly asked Palau to “denounce Taiwan.” “And we have said: ‘We have no enemies, but nobody tells us who our friends are,’” he said. Whipps has told reporters multiple times
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