SINGAPORE, (AFP) - Singapore has issued its strongest response to Taiwan Foreign Minister Chen Tan-sun's description of the city state as a "booger", saying the comments were "extreme" and "painful".
"This recent outburst is a source of some pain and sadness to us that it should come to this," Foreign Minister George Yeo said in comments published by the Straits Times.
"We could disagree, but there's no need for some of these extreme actions."
Yeo ignited Chen's fury when he delivered a lecture to the United Nations General Assembly on September 24 warning Taiwan it should not push for independence from China.
"Even a country the size of a booger (bogey) brazenly criticized Taiwan and former president Lee Teng-hui in the United Nations," Chen responded on September 27 in the colourful Hokkien dialect that many people in both Taiwan and Singapore speak.
"It was nothing but an effort to embrace China's 'balls', forgive me using such a word. What he said was to try to please China."
While refusing to apologise, Chen has since explained he had dropped his diplomatic language in a bid to express his emotions to a group of Hokkien-speaking independence activists in terms they would be familiar with.
"I tried to communicate with them using a language which I learned as a child ... that moment was not a press conference aimed to criticise Singapore," he said last week
But Yeo, speaking to local reporters on Saturday night, said he found the terms used by Chen as "a little strange", according to the Straits Times.
He said that, as many Singaporeans are Hokkien, "we can relate to the words and phrases used".
Singapore's foreign ministry issued a short statement last week in response to Chen's comments, describing them as "intemperate", but it was less emotional than Yeo's reaction.
Yeo also reiterated Singapore's concerns over Taiwan's independence ambitions.
"The way some of the pro-independence forces in Taiwan are pushing their way, this will have grave consequences for the future," the paper quoted him as saying.
"The reason we take an interest in this subject is we have an over-riding interest in peaceful cross-strait relations. If they keep pushing, one day there will be war and the whole region will be engulfed."
Beijing sees Taiwan as part of its territory awaiting reunification -- by force if necessary. The two sides split at the end of a civil war in 1949.
A Singapore foreign ministry spokeswoman was unavailable to speak with AFP on Monday to confirm Yeo's comments.