Star Duo for Taiwan Dialogue

The mainland's former Taiwan point man Chen Yunlin was elected president of the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits (ARATS) on June 3. Wang Yi, a veteran diplomat, replaced Chen as minister of the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council and the Taiwan Work Office of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China.

ARATS, a nongovernmental organization authorized by the Chinese Government to handle technical and business affairs with Taiwan, was founded in December 1991.

Chen, 66, was appointed vice minister of the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council in 1994 and promoted to minister of the office in 1997.

In his 10-year tenure, Chen participated in a large number of cross-Straits exchange activities. Last month, he accompanied Kuomintang Chairman Wu Poh-hsiung on a six-day mainland tour.

Chen's first job in his new capacity is to host the first consultation between ARATS and Taiwan-based Strait Exchange Foundation (SEF) in nine years later this month. A delegation headed by SEF Chairman Chiang Pin-kun would visit Beijing for this purpose on June 11-14.

ARATS' Wang and late SEF Chairman Koo Chen-fu held two historical meetings in April 1993 and October 1998 on a wide range of issues. The two meetings played a significant role in pushing forward cross-Straits ties and strengthening bilateral exchanges. However, dialogue between the two organizations halted in 1999 after former Taiwan leader Lee Teng-hui put forward the "two states" theory in pursuit of "Taiwan independence."

The mainland's new top official in charge of Taiwan affairs, the 55-year-old Wang, was executive vice minister of foreign affairs before the appointment. He won fame as a skilled negotiator after he successfully hosted the first three rounds of the Six-Party Talks on the North Korean nuclear issue in Beijing in 2003 and 2004 and mediated two chairman's statements on the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. Being China's ambassador to Japan in 2004-07, he helped stabilize Sino-Japanese relations that soured due to former Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's repeated visits to World War II criminals-related Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo.

Determined to Live

Mi Chengfu, 51, and Liu Hongkun, 45, who had been stranded for 20 days in mountains near Mianzhu City after the May 12 massive earthquake in southwest China's Sichuan Province, were successfully airlifted by rescuers on June 1. Among all injured survivors in the disaster, the two miners spent the longest time waiting for their eventual salvage.

After being informed, rescuers began to search for Mi and Liu on May 28 and located them on May 31. Before the successful airlift by a helicopter from the Hong Kong Government Flying Service, four similar attempts failed due to bad weather conditions.

Despite their access to water and some basic food, Liu attributed their survival to a strong will to live. "I never gave up," he said.

"The Sichuan earthquake showed how much China has changed and offered a glimpse of its future: a more open and self-confident nation. The political aftershocks from this defining moment in China's history will be felt long after the ground has ceased to tremble."

Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, in his speech at the Asian Security Conference on May 30

"Dear Grandpa Hu and Grandpa Wen, your love to the quake-affected in Sichuan has again won worldwide respect for China, I hope all the leaders of other countries can also make it this way in their administration."

Hannah Rudoff, a 12-year-old student from the Department of Chinese Studies at the Portland International School, Oregon, in a letter to Chinese President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao

"We call on you to take immediate action to address the world food crisis by mobilizing emergency funding to prevent starvation, removing perverse incentives to turn food into biofuels and managing financial speculation."

Declaration of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization summit in Rome on June 3-5, which was convened for discussing measures to stop the spread of hunger threatening nearly 1 billion people

"We have been committed to improving human rights not on the premise of the will of any nation, group, organization or individual, nor because of a certain activity to be held that makes us concede to the human rights issue."

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang, responding to a question about whether U.S. President George Bush's attendance at the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics would make China concede on human rights issues at a news briefing in Beijing on June 3