Chairman of Taiwan’s largest opposition party, the Kuomintang (KMT), Jiang Qichen said in a media interview on Saturday that the KMT’s participation in the Straits Forum is for exchange, not for peace, and that the pursuit of peace is the biggest purpose of the KMT’s participation in the forum.
The Chinese side will hold the Straits Forum in Xiamen on September 20, and the KMT has already announced that former legislative president Wang Jinping will lead a delegation to attend.
China’s CCTV “Strait Forum” program has recently promoted a picture on Weibo with the headline “This man is coming to the mainland to make peace with the war in the Taiwan Strait”, which triggered the KMT’s discontent and immediately expressed its protest to the forum’s organizer, the Taiwan Affairs Office of the People’s Republic of China.
It is understood that the CCTV film has been removed from the Internet, and Hong Kong’s China News Agency reports that mainland authorities on Taiwan have said that the CCTV program’s comments do not represent an official position.
KMT Chairman Jiang Qichen said Friday night via Facebook that he could not accept the CCTV program’s claims and demanded an apology from the mainland.
Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) spokeswoman Yan Ruofang said that China’s CCTV set the tone for the trip as “seeking peace,” apparently to give the KMT small shoes to fill and belittle Taiwan’s sovereign status, and she questioned whether the KMT still wants to ignore social perceptions and insist on attending the forum.
Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen, who came to power in 2016, triggered discontent with the Chinese authorities for not accepting the one-China, individual expressions of the 1992 Consensus, and in addition to interrupting official exchanges between the two sides, also took measures such as limiting travel to Taiwan by mainlanders and circling Taiwan by military aircraft and warships.
The KMT recently held a plenary session to propose a new cross-strait discourse, confirming the continuation of the 1992 Consensus based on the Constitution of the Republic of China, continuing to promote cross-strait communication and dialogue to avoid war, and putting forward eight propositions against Taiwan independence and the Chinese Communist Party’s one country, two systems.
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