The US State Department’s latest annual guideline on contacts between US and Taiwanese officials offered nothing new, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said yesterday, refuting criticisms that the guideline was more restrictive than ever.
“The same guideline is circulated around the same time each year to all the foreign embassies and US government posts. It was nothing new,” ministry spokesman Henry Chen (陳銘政) said, adding that Taiwan has suggested Washington stop repeating the same gesture each year to avoid misunderstandings.
“Some people, when they hear there is a new guideline, they might misinterpret that the US has adopted new policies on Taiwan, which is not the case,” he said.
The guidelines are a set of prohibitions issued to all US officials to limit bilateral interactions with their Taiwanese counterparts because Washington has only maintains unofficial relations with Taiwan since 1979. The guideline bars any US official from writing personal thank-you notes to a Taiwanese official unless written on plain paper and using plain envelops to disguise the sender’s official identity.
Some critics have said that the wording in the 2008 guideline released last week imposed stricter restrictions on visits between Taiwan and US officials.
The new guideline specifically bars the display of the Republic of China flag on US premises, a condition not listed in the 2001 guideline, critics said.
Lawrence Walker, a press officer at the American Institute in Taiwan, in a telephone interview with the Taipei Times, said that the latest guidance offers no new insights to the US’ long-standing position on Taiwan and that Washington will continue to maintain an unofficial relationship with Taipei under the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) framework.
“The US has not changed its policy towards Taiwan. The TRA offers the overall legal framework for the US’ unofficial relations with Taiwan and under this framework, the State Department [for many years] releases an annual guideline on how to conduct those unofficial relations,” he said.
Walker said some minor modifications could be added or subtracted to the guidelines, but the overall context remains the same year after year.
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