Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

China’s non-binding agreements

Chang Kuo-tsai 張國財

According to the White House, US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) are to hold their first face-to-face meeting today, on the sidelines of the G20 gathering in Indonesia.

The US has said that it would brief Taiwan on the results of the meeting, and on Friday last week, Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Zhao Lijian (趙立堅) responded to this by calling it “egregious in nature,” and said that in so doing the US would be in serious contravention of the “one China” principle and the Three Joint Communiques.

Hero died upholding democracy

Michael Lin 林子堯

Tseng Sheng-kuang (曾聖光), a former soldier in Taiwan’s Republic of China Armed Forces (ROCAF) who also went by the name of Jonathan Tseng, joined the ranks of the Ukrainian army and was sadly killed last week in fierce fighting against the Russians.

Some commentators have claimed that he fled Taiwan because he was in debt. The truth is he stepped forward because he was worried about the peril facing the world’s democracies, and because of his professional military experience. He is not just a hero of the world’s democracies, but also the kind of person that Taiwan would most need in the event of a war.

Kyiv service to be held for fallen Taiwanese soldier

Taipei Times

The Ukrainian military is planning to hold a farewell ceremony in Kyiv to honor Tseng Sheng-guang (曾聖光), a Hualien County-native who died fighting for Ukraine last week.

“He proved himself as a disciplined, balanced, brave warrior,” Vasylyna Nakonechna, a press officer at the military’s Carpathian Sich Battalion, said on Wednesday.

Tseng, 25, was a member of the International Legion of the Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces. He died during a combat mission in the contested Luhansk region on Wednesday last week, making him the first Taiwanese volunteer combatant to die in the Ukraine war.

Fighting for a worthy cause

Taipei Times Editorials

Tseng Sheng-kuang (曾聖光) died fighting in Ukraine on Wednesday last week. Some questioned why he had not stayed here and readied himself to defend Taiwan against a potential invasion by China.

Fighting against the tyranny of aggressive autocracies invading a sovereign nation resonates with Taiwan’s own predicament, on both moral and practical levels. The war in Ukraine is widely seen as a testing ground for the success or failure of a smaller state defending itself against a far larger one, under the conditions of modern warfare and with the support of powerful allies.

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