Sean Lien, vice chairman of the Chinese Kuomintang (KMT) party, highlighted the importance of cultural exchanges between young people across the Taiwan Strait, stressing the need for regular dialogue and meetings for the two sides to remove misunderstandings.
Lien made the remarks in an exclusive interview with the China Global Television Network (CGTN) on the sidelines of the third Sichuan Cross-Strait Animation and Music Culture Week in Chengdu, capital city of southwest China's Sichuan Province.
When asked what role the cultural exchanges play in promoting youth exchanges across the Strait, he cited the Sichuan-located Sanxingdui Museum, a treasure trove of exquisite bronze, gold and jade wares dating back more than 3,200 years.
"We share the same culture and the same history. So there are many things [and] there are many stories in our history, our 5,000-year history that can give us a lot of ideas. For example, today, this morning I went to the Sanxingdui Museum, and I was thinking maybe in the future we're probably going to see people will probably make a movie or animations, based upon Sanxingdui, the culture and myth in Chinese history," he said.
As the mainland has seen several visits paid by delegations led by KMT officials since the beginning of this year, Lien called for regular cross-Strait communication to prevent misunderstandings that might arise from the geographical separation between the two sides.
"If we just keep being apart from each other, you're eventually going to have a lot of misunderstandings, either through media, [or] the internet, you're going to eventually disseminate a lot of wrong information, which will definitely cause trouble. So a lot of stuff, maybe we have very different opinions about certain things or certain ideas, but it doesn't mean that we cannot meet each other and sit down and talk about our differences and see if we can actually work out a solution for our problem," he said.
He deplored the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) authorities for irresponsibly dealing with the fatal fishing boat incident in the waters around Kinmen.
The incident in February was caused by the Taiwan side's brutal expulsion of a mainland fishing boat and resulted in injuries and deaths of the fishermen aboard.
"When KMT was in power, these type of unfortunate incidents, or I should call it a tragedy, could be resolved probably within weeks. The problem is that they don't want to deal with the key issue, which is the loss of life, [which is] very unfortunate. And these things, for a lot of those DPP politicians, probably even become secondary. I think they have their political agenda and they probably want to push forward their political agenda. So that's why the whole thing got delayed. If it's KMT in power, we'll probably resolve this incident in a very humane way, because at the end of the day we are talking about humanity. This is part of humanity where you should show people your sympathy and try to make people feel better, especially to the families of those fishermen who lost their lives. A lot of politicians in Taiwan, I think they purposely try to delete [the history] from our kids' education, but these are 'dirty politics'," he said.
The three-day third Sichuan Cross-Strait Animation and Music Culture Week opened on Saturday and gathered 400-plus people from the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan.
KMT vice chairman stresses importance of cross-Strait cultural exchanges
