Vice President William Lai (賴清德), the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) presidential candidate, yesterday said he does not care to respond to Chinese officials’ remarks on Taiwan’s election, as they have no experience of operating in a democracy.
Their “nonsensical comments” about Taiwan’s presidential election is proof that China is interfering in the vote, he added.
Lai, who yesterday announced that Representative to the US Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) would be his running mate for the Jan. 13 election, was responding to media queries about remarks made by China’s Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) spokeswoman Zhu Fenglian (朱鳳蓮).
Photo: CNA
Zhu said that Lai and Hsiao are a “dual-separatist combination.”
Taiwanese should “be keenly aware” of what the ticket “means for the situation across the Taiwan Strait, the lives and fortunes of Taiwanese, and the future and destiny of Taiwan,” she said.
Separately, Hong Kong’s Ming Pao newspaper yesterday quoted Shanghai TAO Deputy Director Yang Li-hua (陽禮華) as saying that Lai winning the election might help to accelerate the process of Taiwan’s unification with China.
Advocating Taiwanese independence would provide China with an opportunity to pursue unification, Yang was quoted as saying.
China “has no fear” and is able to deal with whoever wins the presidential election in January, he said.
However, if Lai is elected president, Beijing might be able to pursue unification much faster, he said.
On the other hand, if the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) candidate won, the process might be slower, giving China “a few more years of development” to become even stronger, he said.
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
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