With the upcoming Washington visit of Chinese President Hu Jintao (
The bill, sponsored by Steve Chabot and Sherrod Brown, two Ohio members, was introduced on Thursday and referred to the House International Relations Committee for deliberation.
Noting that Taiwan is one of the "flashpoints in the world," the bill says that direct meetings between top US and Taiwanese leaders are in the US national interest.
It says the current policy, which bars Taiwan's president, vice president, premier, foreign minister and defense minister from coming to Washington, dates from the 1970s and was instituted under pressure from China.
In 1994, Congress passed a law that challenged that policy by allowing Taiwan's president and other high-level officials into the US for talks with officials on a range of issues, including matters of national security, trade and prevention of nuclear proliferation. The Chabot-Brown bill takes note of that law.
"Taiwan is one of the strongest democratic allies of the US in the Asia-Pacific region," the bill states. Yet, while US President George W. Bush in a speech in Kyoto last November praised Taiwan's democracy, that "has yet to be translated into equal treatment of Taiwan's democratically elected leaders ... while allowing the unelected leaders of the People's Republic of China to routinely visit Washington, and welcoming them to the White House."
The bill would end "all restrictions" on visits by Taiwan's president and other top officials, encourage high-level contacts at Cabinet level to "strengthen a policy dialogue with Taiwan's government," and declare it to be "in the national interest of the US to strengthen its links with the democratically elected government of Taiwan and demonstrate stronger support for democracy in the Asia-Pacific region."
The bill, which expresses the "sense of Congress," would not be binding on the administration.
International Relations Committee chairman Henry Hyde this week praised Taiwan as "a great example to the rest of the world about how democracy can work."
"I think the [Taiwanese] people are extraordinarily brave, extraordinarily productive. They have fought Communism successfully by themselves for many years, and they defeated Communism, and are still a free and sovereign state," he said after receiving the highest civilian award from Chen.
"Their interests are our interests, and our interests are their interests," he added.
The Formosan Association for Public Affairs, which had a role in drafting the bill, praised it strongly.
"The timing of the introduction of this important resolution is very significant," association president C.T. Lee said.
"With the upcoming visit of China's unelected President Hu Jintao to the White House, the [caucus] co-chairs are sending a crystal clear signal to President Bush that the democratically elected president of Taiwan should be welcomed to DC as well," he said.
Hu will visit Washington from April 19 to April 21. He will spend much of the day of the 20th with Bush and his aides, with an all-morning meeting and a formal lunch.
The visit will be a working visit, not a state visit, so Hu will not be given the normal formal dinner at the White House.
His big public appearance will be at a dinner on the 20th, when a passel of private organizations seeking good relations with Beijing hosts him at a dinner in which he will give a speech.
During his two days in Washington, Hu will also meet with members of Congress, China supporters at the Chinese Embassy, and various China-watchers in the city.
After a trip to Yale University, Hu will then visit Nicaragua, Morocco and Saudi Arabia.
The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday said it is fully aware of the situation following reports that the son of ousted Chinese politician Bo Xilai (薄熙來) has arrived in Taiwan and is to marry a Taiwanese. Local media reported that Bo Guagua (薄瓜瓜), son of the former member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, is to marry the granddaughter of Luodong Poh-Ai Hospital founder Hsu Wen-cheng (許文政). The pair met when studying abroad and arranged to get married this year, with the wedding breakfast to be held at The One holiday resort in Hsinchu
The Taipei Zoo on Saturday said it would pursue legal action against a man who was filmed climbing over a railing to tease and feed spotted hyenas in their enclosure earlier that day. In videos uploaded to social media on Saturday, a man can be seen climbing over a protective railing and approaching a ledge above the zoo’s spotted hyena enclosure, before dropping unidentified objects down to two of the animals. The Taipei Zoo in a statement said the man’s actions were “extremely inappropriate and even illegal.” In addition to monitoring the hyenas’ health, the zoo would collect evidence provided by the public
A decision to describe a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement on Singapore’s Taiwan policy as “erroneous” was made because the city-state has its own “one China policy” and has not followed Beijing’s “one China principle,” Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Tien Chung-kwang (田中光) said yesterday. It has been a longstanding practice for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to speak on other countries’ behalf concerning Taiwan, Tien said. The latest example was a statement issued by the PRC after a meeting between Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財) and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on the sidelines of the APEC summit
A road safety advocacy group yesterday called for reforms to the driver licensing and retraining system after a pedestrian was killed and 15 other people were injured in a two-bus collision in Taipei. “Taiwan’s driver’s licenses are among the easiest to obtain in the world, and there is no mandatory retraining system for drivers,” Taiwan Vision Zero Alliance, a group pushing to reduce pedestrian fatalities, said in a news release. Under the regulations, people who have held a standard car driver’s license for two years and have completed a driver training course are eligible to take a test
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