A Chinese dissident said yesterday that Beijing had picked former vice president Lien Chan (連戰) to be Taiwan’s representative at APEC months before this week’s announcement.
Yuan Hongbing (袁紅冰), former president of Guizhou Teachers’ College Law School, told a press conference held by the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) that Lien’s appointment was not news to him because his friends in Beijing had told him about it months ago.
TSU Chairman Huang Kun-huei (黃昆輝) said he knew Ma wanted former foreign minister Fredrick Chien (錢復) to represent him at the forum, but Beijing asked Ma to pick Lien.
PHOTO: LIU HSIN-DE, TAIPEI TIMES
Huang said Ma was being controlled by Beijing and he had become a Chinese puppet.
On Wednesday Ma appointed Lien as his representative at the APEC Forum in Peru next month.
Yuan said Beijing convened a high-level meeting soon after Ma won the presidential election in May to form its Taiwan strategy.
He said China would offer Taiwan some benefits to show “goodwill” and help Ma win a second term and was prepared to expand political, economic and cultural exchanges.
China would try not to confront Ma before 2012, Yuan said, but during Ma’s second term Beijing would bring highly political issues to the table and attempt to push Taiwan into a unification framework.
“The strategy is to take over Taiwan without the use of military force by 2016,” Yuan said.
Yuan warned the people of Taiwan not to allow themselves to be deceived by Beijing.
Huang said that Yuan was an advocate of the rule of law and freedom in China, who was persecuted following the crackdown on China’s pro-democracy movement in 1989.
In March 1994, he was arrested at Beijing University and “secretly transferred to Guizhou and detained there for about six months.”
Yuan escaped China in 2004 and now lives in Australia, where he is a voice for Chinese democracy, Huang said.
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