Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

Ma’s moves toward political talks

Taipei Times Editorial

Having served up a charm offensive touting the benefits of closer economic ties with China, Beijing is making no secret of its growing impatience for political talks with Taiwan.

Its annoyance is evident in the recent string of calls to talk politics. First, there was the blunt comment from Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) who, speaking with Taiwan’s APEC envoy Vincent Siew (蕭萬長) on the sidelines of the APEC meeting in Bali earlier this month, said “the longstanding political division between the two sides will have to be resolved step-by-step, as it should not be passed down from generation to generation.”

Tibet must be lesson for Taiwan: dissident

Taipei Times

Chinese dissident and author Yuan Hongbing promotes his book Shafo in Taipei yesterday.
Photo: George Tsorng, Taipei Times

The 10th Panchen Lama was murdered by former Chinese president Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) and former Chinese premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶), a prominent Chinese dissident said in Taipei yesterday as he warned that Beijing’s cultural genocide in Tibet could serve an example for those Taiwanese who still have false expectations of China.

Citing the findings from his private interviews with Chinese and Tibetan officials, Yuan Hongbing (袁紅兵) told a press conference that the 10th Panchen Lama, Choekyi Gyaltsen, was poisoned to death in January 1989 rather than dying from a heart attack as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) claimed.

KMT, CCP both see their home in China

Lee Min-yung 李敏勇

The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) ruled the Republic of China (ROC) in China for about 22 years, from 1927, after the Northern Expedition provided some national unity to a China divided by warlords and revolution to the time it moved to Taiwan, after being thrown out of China by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1949 at the end of the Chinese Civil War.

When it came to implementing a Leninist party-state system, the CCP learned from the expert KMT.

Even today, both parties hold to the “one China” principle. The CCP sees the elimination of the ROC as unfinished business, and the KMT — and President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) — claims that the territory of the ROC also includes China.

Taiwan has a strategic role to play in region

Rong-i Arthur Hong 洪榮一

On Oct. 11, former American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) director William Stanton delivered a talk in Taipei that was open to the public, titled “The Strategic Significance of Taiwan.” In addition to talking about well-known themes such as Taiwan’s economic development and democratic transformation from a geostrategic perspective, Stanton also examined the special strategic position the nation occupies in the first island chain to provide a reinterpretation of Taiwan’s strategic importance to the US as an unsinkable aircraft carrier and as a supply station for submarines.

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