The highest-ranked Chinese official to visit Taiwan in a decade is slated to arrive today to attend the funeral of Taiwan's top cross-strait negotiator, but the Mainland Affairs Council yesterday cautioned against reading too much political significance into the event.
"We will respect their wishes regarding how to handle this visit," Council Vice Chairman Chiu Tai-san (
Beijing announced on Sunday that three Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait (ARATS) officials would represent ARATS Chairman Wang Daohan (汪道涵) at the memorial service of his late counterpart, former Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) Chairman Koo Chen-fu (辜振甫). As the heads of the two semi-official organizations that oversee cross-strait interaction in the absence of formal ties, the two conducted landmark negotiations in Singapore in 1993 and later in 1998 in Beijing. Koo died in January of kidney failure.
Beijing's Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) Deputy director and ARATS vice chairman Sun Yafu (孫亞夫), ARATS Secretary-General Li Yafei (李亞飛) and ARATS research department director Ma Xiaoguang (馬曉光) are slated to arrive on China Airlines Flight 606 at 2:30pm, according to the SEF.
Sun will be the highest-ranked TAO official to visit Taiwan since 1995, when then ARATS vice chairman and TAO deputy director Tang Shubei (
According to Chiu, the Chinese officials' stay in Taiwan could be as short as just 30 hours. They are slated to depart immediately after Koo's memorial service tomorrow. While there has been speculation that the three might not show up at the service because President Chen Shui-bian (
Asked whether there would be any official contact made during the delegation's visit, Chiu said only that it depended on the ARATS officials.
However, according to a report in the United Daily News Sun told Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislator Ho Chih-hui (
Chiu expressed regret that Wang, 90, was unable to attend Koo's service in person. He said that if Wang had expressed a willingness to visit, the Council could have arranged a private plane for him.
"It would have been no problem," Chiu said, explaining that after all, Koo and Wang had been good friends and made history together.
A magnitude 4.9 earthquake struck off Tainan at 11:47am today, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. The hypocenter was 32.3km northeast of Tainan City Hall at a depth of 7.3km, CWA data showed. The intensity of the quake, which gauges the actual effect of a seismic event, measured 4 in Tainan and Chiayi County on Taiwan's seven-tier intensity scale, the data showed. The quake had an intensity of 3 in Chiayi City and County, and Yunlin County, while it was measured as 2 in Kaohsiung, Nantou County, Changhua County, Taitung County and offshore Penghu County, the data showed. There were no immediate reports of
Weather conditions across Taiwan are expected to remain stable today, but cloudy to rainy skies are expected from tomorrow onward due to increasing moisture in the atmosphere, according to the Central Weather Administration (CWA). Daytime highs today are expected to hit 25-27°C in western Taiwan and 22-24°C in the eastern counties of Yilan, Hualien, and Taitung, data on the CWA website indicated. After sunset, temperatures could drop to 16-17°C in most parts of Taiwan. For tomorrow, precipitation is likely in northern Taiwan as a cloud system moves in from China. Daytime temperatures are expected to hover around 25°C, the CWA said. Starting Monday, areas
Taiwan has recorded its first fatal case of Coxsackie B5 enterovirus in 10 years after a one-year-old boy from southern Taiwan died from complications early last month, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said yesterday. CDC spokesman Lo Yi-chun (羅一鈞) told a news conference that the child initially developed a fever and respiratory symptoms before experiencing seizures and loss of consciousness. The boy was diagnosed with acute encephalitis and admitted to intensive care, but his condition deteriorated rapidly, and he passed away on the sixth day of illness, Lo said. This also marks Taiwan’s third enterovirus-related death this year and the first severe
A Taiwanese software developer has created a generative artificial intelligence (AI) model to help people use AI without exposing sensitive data, project head Huang Chung-hsiao (黃崇校) said yesterday. Huang, a 55-year-old coder leading a US-based team, said that concerns over data privacy and security in popular generative AIs such as ChatGPT and DeepSeek motivated him to develop a personal AI assistant named “Mei.” One of the biggest security flaws with cloud-based algorithms is that users are required to hand over personal information to access the service, giving developers the opportunity to mine user data, he said. For this reason, many government agencies and
RSS