The 2023 Taipei-Shanghai Twin-City Forum is scheduled for next month in Shanghai. It will be the 14th forum since it was launched in 2010, and also the first in which Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) participates as Taipei mayor.
It is unclear exactly how beneficial the twin-city forum has been to the residents of Taipei over the course of the past decade or so. By all appearances, it has become little more than a stage for the Taipei mayor to build personal relations with the other side of the Taiwan Strait.
Before he left office last year, then-Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) went against the Taipei City Council’s resolution by insisting on holding the 13th twin-city forum despite the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) constant threat against Taiwan with warplanes and warships.
As a result, Ko saddled the Taipei City Government with a debt of nearly NT$1 million (US$31,857) for the cost of the forum that has remained unresolved.
If the twin-city forum was really for the city’s and its residents’ benefit, would the council have opposed it? Ko’s wife claimed that the Ko family would pay the debt out of its own pocket if necessary, but as it would later emerge, it only talked the talk. It did not walk the walk.
This year’s twin-city forum is set to take place late next month, which is very close to the 65th anniversary of the “823 Artillery Bombardment” launched by China against Taiwan’s Kinmen on Aug. 23, 1958, during the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis. On this day of great significance, as a descendant of then-president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), the mayor should stay in Taiwan just to observe the Chiang family’s spirit of “gentlemen and thieves cannot coexist” (漢賊不兩立).
How ironic it is that he is going instead to meet with top CCP officials for a merry shindig in Shanghai, instead of paying respects to the brave Taiwanese troops who died resisting the Chinese People’s Liberation Army in Kinmen.
Huang Wei-ping is a former think tank researcher.
Translated by Eddy Chang
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