Government defends choice of APEC proxy

This article was written by Shih Ying-ying and published by the Taiwan Journal on October 21, 2005. It reports that the government in Taiwan has chosen Wang Jin-pyng, Kuomintang (KMT) heavyweight and Legislative Yuan speaker, to represent President Chen Shui-bian at the upcoming annual Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum's informal leaders meeting in Busan, South Korea.

However, Beijing is upset by this decision, saying that Taiwan can only send ministers in charge of economic issues related to APEC to attend its meetings.

In 1991, a memorandum was signed when Taiwan, China and Hong Kong were simultaneously admitted to APEC. At that time, the highest-level APEC event was the annual meeting of economic and foreign affairs ministers of all APEC member economics, and the 1991 memorandum established that Taiwan's foreign ministers would not be able to attend these meetings.

But Taiwan argues that the annual unofficial and informal leaders meeting in question was established in 1993 as an initiative of former US President Bill Clinton, and therefore the 1991 memorandum should not be applicable to the meeting.

APEC is one of the few international organizations that both Taiwan and China are counted as members. Due to opposition from Beijing, presidents of the Republic of China on Taiwan have been unable to attend previous APEC summits and have had to name proxies to attend instead. In the past few years, President Chen has sent Lee Yuan-tseh, head of the Academia Sinica, Taiwan's highest research institute, to represent him at the annual meeting.