Demonstrators yesterday tussled with police and rival protesters at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport as China’s Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) Minister Zhang Zhijun (張志軍) Zhang arrived for a four-day visit and met with Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) Minister Wang Yu-chi (王郁琦).
“No to the Wang-Zhang meeting, Taiwan’s future is ours to decide,” chanted nearly 100 protesters mobilized by groups including the Taiwan March, the Taiwan Association of University Professor and the Democracy Tautin.
At 2:40pm, the activists ran toward the entrance of Novotel Hotel at the airport in Taoyuan County where the meeting had started about 10 minutes earlier.
Photo: Chang Chia-ming, Taipei Times
Police officers holding shields and batons quickly formed a human chain to keep out the protesters. However, the activists outnumbered the officers and did not hesitate to clash with them, managing to break down the human barricade.
When police formed a second line of defense to take its place, the protesters quickly overcame that too. The advancing group stopped right outside the hotel, which was blocked by barber-wired barricades and about 50m away from the building’s entrance.
“Zhang said he is in Taiwan to listen to the voices of Taiwanese, but instead of accepting our invitation to meet, he’s only meeting with officials and business leaders, and taking part in pre-arranged activities,” Taiwan March cofounder and Sunflower movement leader Lin Fei-fan (林飛帆) said. “Who will he really hear during this visit?”
The protesters become upset when they heard reports that during their meeting, Wang had asked Zhang to respect Taiwanese’s choices for their nation’s future, but the Chinese official refused, instead saying that the future of Taiwan should be jointly decided by the people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.
“The stance of Green Party Taiwan is very clear: The future of Taiwan should be decided by Taiwanese alone,” said Wu Ming-hsuan (吳銘軒), who sits on the party’s central executive committee.
Lin said that it is ridiculous for Zhang to claim that Chinese also have the right to decide Taiwan’s future, saying: “Since when do the people of China have the right to decide anything?”
While many Chinese gathered at the airport to welcome Zhang, one of their compatriots, Zhu Yijie (朱依捷), joined the demonstration against the visit. Zhu said that her home in the Chinese city of Wuhan had been forcibly demolished to make way for railroad construction project and urged Zhang to come talk to her.
“If China is incapable of protecting the freedom and rights of its own citizens, how is it able to decide the future of the 23 million people in Taiwan?” she said. “Of course Taiwanese should have the right to decide their own country’s future.”
Chen Wei-ting (陳為廷), who like Lin helped found Taiwan March and lead the Sunflower movement, said that the protesters’ main demand is that no cross-strait negotiations be held, nor agreements signed before legislation to monitor Taiwan-China negotiations is passed.
“Some people say we shouldn’t take China as our enemy, but it’s the only country in the world that has more than 1,000 missiles aimed at Taiwan, if we don’t consider it an enemy, name the country that we should consider one instead,” he said.
Aside from the activists gathered at the airport and the hotel, there were hundreds of other anti-Zhang protesters in the vicinity, notably Falun Gong practitioners and Taiwanese businesspeople who say they invested in China, but fell victim to officially sanctioned fraud or political prosecution.
Prior to Zhang’s arrival, a crowd supporting his visit that consisted mostly of Chinese nationals living in Taiwan and pro-unification activists, including former gang leader Chang An-le (張安樂), clashed with a group of pro-independence demonstrators in the airport lobby.
Although the two crowds were separated by police, a man from the pro-unification crowd moved over to the rival side and pulled down a banner held by the pro-independence activists, sparking a brief clash that was quelled by the police.
‘DENIAL DEFENSE’: The US would increase its military presence with uncrewed ships, and submarines, while boosting defense in the Indo-Pacific, a Pete Hegseth memo said The US is reorienting its military strategy to focus primarily on deterring a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan, a memo signed by US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth showed. The memo also called on Taiwan to increase its defense spending. The document, known as the “Interim National Defense Strategic Guidance,” was distributed this month and detailed the national defense plans of US President Donald Trump’s administration, an article in the Washington Post said on Saturday. It outlines how the US can prepare for a potential war with China and defend itself from threats in the “near abroad,” including Greenland and the Panama
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is maintaining close ties with Beijing, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) said yesterday, hours after a new round of Chinese military drills in the Taiwan Strait began. Political parties in a democracy have a responsibility to be loyal to the nation and defend its sovereignty, DPP spokesman Justin Wu (吳崢) told a news conference in Taipei. His comments came hours after Beijing announced via Chinese state media that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s Eastern Theater Command was holding large-scale drills simulating a multi-pronged attack on Taiwan. Contrary to the KMT’s claims that it is staunchly anti-communist, KMT Deputy
RESPONSE: The government would investigate incidents of Taiwanese entertainers in China promoting CCP propaganda online in contravention of the law, the source said Taiwanese entertainers living in China who are found to have contravened cross-strait regulations or collaborated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) could be subject to fines, a source said on Sunday. Several Taiwanese entertainers have posted on the social media platform Sina Weibo saying that Taiwan “must be returned” to China, and sharing news articles from Chinese state media. In response, the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) has asked the Ministry of Culture to investigate whether the entertainers had contravened any laws, and asked for them to be questioned upon their return to Taiwan, an official familiar with the matter said. To curb repeated
Myanmar has turned down an offer of assistance from Taiwanese search-and-rescue teams after a magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck the nation on Friday last week, saying other international aid is sufficient, the National Fire Agency said yesterday. More than 1,700 have been killed and 3,400 injured in the quake that struck near the central Myanmar city of Mandalay early on Friday afternoon, followed minutes later by a magnitude 6.7 aftershock. Worldwide, 13 international search-and-rescue teams have been deployed, with another 13 teams mobilizing, the agency said. Taiwan’s search-and-rescue teams were on standby, but have since been told to stand down, as
RSS