Taiwan's president visits Twitter Inc. while in San Francisco
2017/01/15 15:16:54
From Tsai Ing-wen's twitter account twitter.com/iingwen
San Francisco, Jan. 14 (CNA) President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) opened a new twitter account Saturday during a visit to micro-messaging service Twitter Inc. during a stopover in San Francisco on her way home from a four-country tour of Central America.
The visit was one of a few activities planned by Tsai while in the San Francisco area to promote her government's Asian Silicon Valley plan and attract talent from Silicon Valley to Taiwan.
At Twitter headquarters, she met with Twitter General Counsel Vijaya Gadde, but CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey was not present, according to a Reuters report that cited a source at the meeting.
The president activated a new Twitter account in English during her visit, after already having a Chinese language account that she has not used in a few years, Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Yao Wen-chih (姚文智) said.
After her stop at Twitter, Tsai attended a luncheon with hundreds of people from the Taiwanese community at the Hyatt Regency near San Francisco International Airport.
Some overseas Taiwanese staged a protest outside the hotel while others showed their support for the president.
Tsai was in San Francisco on her way back to Taiwan following a week-long trip to four diplomatic allies in Central America -- Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador.
But it has been her transit stops in the United States on her way to and from Central America that have drawn the most attention after U.S. President-elect Donald Trump said in December he might reconsider the longstanding "one China" policy.
That came after he took a call from Tsai in early December in which she congratulated him on his victory in the U.S. presidential election in early November.
It was a level of communications between Taiwan and the United States not seen since the two countries severed diplomatic ties in 1979.
Some in Taiwan had hoped Tsai might meet with Trump while in the U.S., but that did not happen.
Tsai made a stopover in Houston on Jan. 7 and 8 before heading to Central America and arrived in San Francisco on Friday night. She departed for Taiwan on Saturday afternoon.
(By Tsao Yu-fan and Evelyn Kao)
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