Minister of the Interior Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) vowed yesterday to maintain safety during next week’s cross-strait talks in Taichung, saying police brutality should not happen this time around.
Talking to reporters at the legislature’s Internal Administration Committee yesterday morning, Jiang said the Taichung City Government and Taichung City Police Bureau would take care of security for the meeting between Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) Chairman Chiang Pin-kung (江丙坤) and Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait (ARATS) Chairman Chen Yunlin (陳雲林).
The central government will do its best to support them, Jiang said.
Normally about 200 police would be deployed, Jiang said. The number would be boosted to 1,000 for Chen’s trips outside the city, he said, adding that it would increase in accordance with the scale of protests if the situation escalates.
“We will do our best to prevent any bloody conflict,” he said. “Such regretful incidents as police attacks on civilians or reporters should not happen again.”
National Police Agency (NPA) Director-General Wang Cho-chiun (王卓鈞) said he did not know whether Beijing would send a security detail to protect Chinese media covering the meeting. No matter who they send, security operations would be handled by Taiwanese authorities, he said.
Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) Deputy Minister Liu Te-shun (劉德勳) said a Chinese security detail could come here as “professionals,” but they could not perform security duties.
Council Chairwoman Lai Shin-yuan (賴幸媛) reiterated the administration’s resolve to protect freedom of speech, saying Taiwan was a democracy where individual freedom to express opinions should be respected and protected as long as it is done in a peaceful, reasonable and legal fashion.
No matter what happened, Lai said the meeting and other arrangements would go ahead as planned and she believed the Ministry of the Interior and security agencies would use their experience and professionalism in a proper manner.
Lai said three sets of talks have been held, including two in China, and the nine agreements and one consensus signed thus far have produced “positive results.”
Lai made the remarks during a long break in the legislative committee meeting after it ground to a halt at around 10am because the ruling and opposition parties were arguing over whether Chiang should attend the meeting.
The meeting did not resume until 6pm when the chairwoman, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Chiu Yi-ying (邱議瑩), declared the meeting over.
Chiu voiced regret over Chiang’s no-show, accusing him of spiting the legislature by ignoring the committee’s invitation to deliver a report.
“I don’t know what he is afraid of,” she said. “He said he is a private individual, but he has the airs of a bureaucratic official so big that not even his superior Mrs Lai [Shin-yuan] can make him come to the committee.”
Had Chiang dared to adopt such a belligerent approach at the negotiation table, the public would have praised his courage, she said.
“But judging from his previous performance, he has proved himself to be someone who is afraid to risk his neck and an opportunist who only pays attention to personal interests and toadying up to China,” she said. “I feel sorry for him.”
Chiu said she didn’t know why Chiang did not attend the meeting.
Chiang later told reporters he did not participate in the negotiations of cross-strait talks and secondly, he simply followed precedents.
Although Chiang did not say why he did not attend the committee meeting, it turned out that he was doing interviews with the Chinese-language United Evening News and ERA News in the morning and briefing the media about the upcoming cross-strait meeting in the afternoon.
A global survey showed that 60 percent of Taiwanese had attained higher education, second only to Canada, the Ministry of the Interior said. Taiwan easily surpassed the global average of 43 percent and ranked ahead of major economies, including Japan, South Korea and the US, data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for 2024 showed. Taiwan has a high literacy rate, data released by the ministry showed. As of the end of last year, Taiwan had 20.617 million people aged 15 or older, accounting for 88.5 percent of the total population, with a literacy rate of 99.4 percent, the data
NEW LOW: The council in 2024 based predictions on a pessimistic estimate for the nation’s total fertility rate of 0.84, but last year that rate was 0.69, 17 percent lower An expected National Development Council (NDC) report expects the nation’s population to drop below 12 million by 2065, with the old-age dependency ratio to top 100 percent sooner than 2070, sources said yesterday. The council is slated to release its latest population projections in August, using an ultra-low fertility model, the sources said. The previous report projected that Taiwan’s population would fall to 14.37 million by 2070, but based on a new estimate of the total fertility rate (TFR) — the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime — the population is expected to reach 12 million by
CCP ‘PAWN’? Beijing could use the KMT chairwoman’s visit to signal to the world that many people in Taiwan support the ‘one China’ principle, an academic said Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday arrived in China for a “peace” mission and potential meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), while a Taiwanese minister detailed the number of Chinese warships currently deployed around the nation. Cheng is visiting at a time of increased Chinese military pressure on Taiwan, as the opposition-dominated Legislative Yuan stalls a government plan for US$40 billion in extra defense spending. Speaking to reporters before going to the airport, Cheng said she was going on a “historic journey for peace,” but added that some people felt uneasy about her trip. “If you truly love Taiwan,
INTENSIFYING THREATS: Beijing’s tactics include massive attacks on the government service network, aircraft and naval vessel incursions and damaging undersea cables China is prepared to interfere in November’s nine-in-one local elections by launching massive attacks on the Taiwanese government’s service network (GSN), a report published by the National Security Bureau showed. The report was submitted to the Legislative Yuan ahead of the bureau’s scheduled briefing at the Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee tomorrow. The national security team has identified about 13,000 suspicious Internet accounts and 860,000 disputed messages, the bureau said of China’s cognitive warfare against Taiwan. The disputed messages focus on major foreign affairs, national defense and economic issues, which were produced using generative artificial intelligence (AI) and distributed through Chinese
RSS