Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

Xi Jinping, year 2027 and Taiwan

Jerome Keating

Anniversaries can serve multiple functions. For example when Taiwan commemorates the 228 Incident, there is a combined feeling of sadness over the sufferings following the events in 1947, joined with the resolve that such a tragedy should never be allowed to happen again.

This year, when Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) attended the 25th anniversary of the UK’s 1997 handover of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), a different and strange mood prevailed. Even stranger yet was Xi’s explanatory narrative.

Those who had attended the historic event in 1997 could recall how festive it had been. Media were everywhere. Hong Kong was to have new leadership; the PRC had promised full democracy by 2017 and many were curious as to what “one country, two systems” would be.

TAO funded pro-unification patriotism party

Taipei Times

Members of the pro-unification Concentric Patriotism Association stage a protest with Chinese national flags outside a venue decorated with the Republic of China flag where the Democratic Progressive PartY was holding its national congress in Taipei on Jan 17, 2008.
Photo: Liao Cheng-hui, Taipei Times

China’s Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) funded the pro-unification Concentric Patriotism Association’s attempts to influence Taiwanese politics, the Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office said yesterday.

The office issued a wanted notice for the association’s late chairman Chou Ching-chun’s (周慶峻) wife, Lin Ming-mei (林明美), and its secretary-general Zhang Xiuye (張秀葉) on charges of contravening the Anti-infiltration Act (反滲透法).

Group recognizes threat from China

Taipei Times

President Tsai Ing-wen speaks in a prerecorded video on the opening day of Liberal International’s congress in Sofia, Bulgaria, on Thursday.
Photo courtesy of the Democratic Progressive Party via CNA

Liberal International on Saturday passed a “World Today Resolution” recognizing the threat that China poses to Taiwan, while supporting Taipei’s inclusion in international organizations.

Liberal International was established in 1947 as a federation of liberal political parties from around the world. Last week, it held its 63rd congress in Sofia, Bulgaria, which was attended by 221 representatives from 58 countries.

Taiwan Strait belongs to the world

Hsieh Shu-yuan 謝淑媛

When I was teaching in Lesotho in southern Africa during the 1980s, I taught a class on comparative foreign policy. The course included trips to the US embassy, the Soviet embassy, the British embassy and the newly established Chinese embassy. The students could ask the ambassadors and staff questions about foreign policy, and would then write a report as their final term paper.

The Chinese ambassador felt that the US-style education I delivered was unique and invited me to go to China to teach.

At the time, China was planning to open up to the world, and it needed professors versed in public international law to cultivate domestic talent. All of the professors who after World War II studied in the West and returned to China had disappeared during the Cultural Revolution, so China had to rely on foreign experts.

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