Establishing a Free Trade Area of Asia-Pacific (FTAAP), pushing for Taiwan’s membership in the WHO and improving economic ties with other members would be the main objectives at this year’s APEC meeting, former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairman Lien Chan (連戰) said yesterday.
Lien, who was appointed by President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) as the nation’s envoy at this year’s APEC summit meeting in Lima, Peru, made the remarks during a press conference in Taipei.
Lien is scheduled to leave for Lima on Wednesday.
He said that other than the challenges commonly faced by all economies — the global financial crisis, unstable raw material prices and natural disasters — Taiwan’s international trade relations are “threatened by trade protectionism, such as exclusive regional economic cooperation and Free Trade Agreements [FTA],” and that “APEC is a very good platform for us to try to resolve such challenges.”
Therefore, Lien said, one of the main objectives would be establishing an FTAAP.
“Many people have asked me if we will try to sign FTAs with the US or Singapore,” Lien said. “I’d say that, while it’s important to sign FTAs with individual countries, we would gain more if we could be part of an Asia-Pacific FTA. So that’s what we’ll focus on this time.”
Taiwan’s membership in the WHO, Lien said, would be another focus.
“Natural disaster prevention and post-disaster reconstruction is one of the topics that will be discussed during the meeting. Therefore, from a strictly disease prevention point of view, issues concerning our WHO membership bid can certainly be raised,” Lien told the press conference.
Asked by reporters if he would seize the opportunity to meet Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) and talk about cross-strait relations, Lien said that he would certainly like to meet Hu, but would limit any discussion to the economy.
“We have very little time and a lot of economic or trade issues to talk about,” Lien said. “It’s an especially scarce opportunity since we’ll have our top economic officials with us on the team and they [China] will have theirs on their team — so this is a perfect chance to talk about such issues.”
Lien then said that he would not worry about how he and Hu would address each other.
“We’ve met several times already. He always calls me ‘[KMT honorary] chairman Lien’ and I call him ‘[Chinese Communist Party] Secretary-General Hu’ — I actually wouldn’t mind if he calls me ‘leader’s representative,’ I’ll call him ‘leader’ in that case,” Lien said.
Lien went on to say that he would like to meet as many world leaders as possible, but that “everything is still being arranged by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”
Foreign tourists who purchase a seven-day Taiwan Pass are to get a second one free of charge as part of a government bid to boost tourism, the Tourism Administration said yesterday. A pair of Taiwan Passes is priced at NT$5,000 (US$156.44), an agency staff member said, adding that the passes can be used separately. The pass can be used in many of Taiwan’s major cities and to travel to several tourist resorts. It expires seven days after it is first used. The pass is a three-in-one package covering the high-speed rail system, mass rapid transport (MRT) services and the Taiwan Tourist Shuttle services,
Drinking a lot of water or milk would not help a person who has ingested terbufos, a toxic chemical that has been identified as the likely cause of three deaths, a health expert said yesterday. An 83-year-old woman surnamed Tseng (曾) and two others died this week after eating millet dumplings with snails that Tseng had made. Tseng died on Tuesday and others ate the leftovers when they went to her home to mourn her death that evening. Twelve people became ill after eating the dumplings following Tseng’s death. Their symptoms included vomiting and convulsions. Six were hospitalized, with two of them
DIVA-READY: The city’s deadline for the repairs is one day before pop star Jody Chiang is to perform at the Taipei Dome for the city’s Double Ten National Day celebrations The Taipei City Government has asked Farglory Group (遠雄集團) to repair serious water leaks in the Taipei Dome before Friday next week, Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) said yesterday, following complaints that many areas at the stadium were leaking during two baseball games over the weekend. The dome on Saturday and Sunday hosted two games in tribute to CTBC Brothers’ star Chou Szu-chi (周思齊) ahead of his retirement from the CPBL. The games each attracted about 40,000 people, filling the stadium to capacity. However, amid heavy rain, many people reported water leaking on some seats, at the entrance and exit areas, and the
BIG collection: The herbarium holds more than 560,000 specimens, from the Japanese colonial period to the present, including the Wulai azalea, which is now extinct in the wild The largest collection of plant specimens in Taiwan, the Taipei Botanical Garden’s herbarium, is celebrating its 100th anniversary with an exhibition that opened on Friday. The herbarium provides critical historical documents for botanists and is the first of its kind in Taiwan, Taiwan Forestry Research Institute director Tseng Yen-hsueh (曾彥學) said. It is housed in a two-story red brick building, which opened during 1924. At the time, it stored 30,000 plant specimens from almost 6,000 species, including Taiwanese plant samples collected by Tomitaro Makino, the “father of Japanese botany,” Tseng said. The herbarium collection has grown in the century since its