Focus Taiwan
Date: 2015/04/02
By: Liao Jen-kai, Hao Hsueh-ching and Kuo Chung-han

Taipei, April 2 (CNA) A college junior, who was buried under rubble for 86 hours after the 921 earthquake when he was 6, said Thursday he would like to visit South Korea to thank his rescuers and share his story with Korean children.

The disastrous earthquake, measuring 7.3 on the Richter open-end scale, rocked Taiwan at 1:47 a.m. on Sept. 21, 1999, with the epicenter at a depth of about 8 kilometers in Jiji Township in the central county of Nantou. It was the strongest quake to hit the island in the past 100 years.

Chang Ching-hung’s (張景閎) home, was originally on the 2nd floor of the residential “Dynasty” building in what is now Dali District, Taichung City, but he was discovered trapped in his room, which had crashed into the building’s basement at around 11 a.m. on Sept. 24, some 81 hours after the temblor.     [FULL  STORY]

Want China Times
Date: 2015-04-02
By: CNA

Taiwan may fall behind its rival South Korea in trade development if it fails to join multinational

organizations such as the proposed China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), a local economist said Wednesday.

Wu Chung-shu, president of the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research, advised that Taiwan participate more actively in regional economic integration to expand its foreign trade opportunities.

Taiwan needs to become more open in its trade and economic development otherwise it may lag behind South Korea, Wu said, addressing public concerns over China’s influential role in Taiwan’s bid to join the AIIB.     [FULL  STORY]

REFLECTIONS:The legislative speaker continued to deny he would stand in next year’s presidential elections, while in a speech he analyzed the need for parliamentary reform

Taipei Times
Date: Apr 03, 2015
By: Alison Hsiao  /  Staff reporter

Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) in a speech at National Taipei University of

Technology yesterday dismissed a rumor that he was going to announce his presidential candidacy.

The speech was titled: “The Cans and Cannots of the Legislative Speaker: 40 years in legislature.”

Speculation has been rife that Wang will announce his intention to represent the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in the presidential election next year, despite his constant denials over the past few months.

Media reports on Wednesday said that he would be “releasing important messages” in yesterday’s speech, which had been suspected to be related to his potential presidential candidacy.     [FULL  STORY]

Want China Times
Date: 2015-04-01
By: CNA

Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je said Tuesday that his comment about “one China” may have been

taken out of context by Chinese media and he suggested that people pay greater attention to the connotations of the term.

In response to questions by mainland Chinese media Monday about the 1992 Consensus, Ko said no one in the world thinks there are “two Chinas” and therefore “one China” is not a problem.

The 1992 Consensus is a tacit cross-strait agreement that there is “one China,” with each side free to interpret what that means.     [FULL  STORY]

Want China Times
Date: 2015-04-01
By: Lin Ruei-yi and Staff Reporter

Taiwan’s main opposition Democratic Progressive Party must come up with plans that can set

its partners’ minds at ease as it looks to the presidential election next year, according to Michael Jonathan Green, a senior vice president for Asia and Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and former White House official, our Chinese-language sister paper Want Daily reports.

Green, who made the statement on the sidelines of the US-Japan Security Seminar 2015, said Taiwan’s partners include the US and Japan. When DPP leader Tsai Ing-wen last visited the US, the US government and certain local think tanks got the impression that she would be able to accept the cross-strait 1992 Consensus, which was felt would make the US government’s job easier when sealing with cross-strait issues.

Green said Tsai is a political leader and the US should not intervene or question the policies of a democratic leader. But when political interests are at stake, the DPP will need to find ways to make Taiwan’s partners at ease ahead of the presidential election in 2016, he said.     [FULL  STORY]

Taiwan News
By William A. Stanton, Ph.D.
Taiwan News, Contributing Writer

The Taipei Dome — in Chinese 臺北大巨蛋 or “Taipei’s Big Giant Egg” — will have the honor of

serving as a key venue of the 2017 World University Games or Universiade, second only to the Olympics as the world’s most important international sporting competition. Unfortunately, the name “Giant Egg” is all too ironically appropriate in English because from an aesthetic, historical, functional, and city planning point of view, Taipei really has “laid a giant egg.” As English speakers know, the key meaning of the idiomatic expression “to lay an egg” is to do something badly, to perform poorly in public, or to fail miserably and in a humiliating fashion in front of others.

From my apartment, I have been able to watch the problem-plagued Giant Egg rise higher and higher, looming over the Sun Yat Sen Memorial Hall, the now rather small and getting-smaller tribute to the founding father of the Republic of China. Knowing at the start of construction very little about the history of the Giant Egg, I have been frankly astonished, and then increasingly felt ashamed, that city planners would have decided to position Sun Yat Sen’s Memorial in the shadow of a sports arena, shopping mall, and two associated skyscrapers.     [FULL  STORY]

Want China Times
Date: 2015-03-31
By: Staff Reporter

China is likely to create a buffer zone within its newly created M503 flight route which will

extend the time People’s Liberation Army fighters would take to reach the median line of the Taiwan Strait from five seconds to 55 seconds, a senior official from Taipei’s Mainland Affairs Council has told our sister paper Want Daily.

The M503 route was originally created in 2007 but China postponed the implementation of the air route prior to the 2008 presidential election in Taiwan in 2008 as it was mindful that the controversy could undermine the likely victory of the Kuomintang’s Ma Ying-jeou, seen as the pro-China candidate. Furthermore, China did not have that many scheduled flights across the strait at the time, according to the official.     [FULL  STORY]