Media reports last week revealed that satellite imagery used by the Council of Agriculture to monitor crop growth was sourced from a Chinese firm through a Taiwanese intermediary, resulting in widespread criticism of the council.
The council’s tender was won by a Taiwanese firm, but the images were supplied by Guangdong-based Orbita Aerospace Science and Technology and taken by China’s Zhuhai-1 remote sensing satellite.
The intention was to gain real-time understanding of supply and demand in the agricultural sector.
However, from a military strategic perspective, the government has spent large sums of money to give a Chinese company direct control over data on Taiwan’s agricultural sector and the council’s Agricultural Research Institute terminated the deal on July 22.
People should not be too quick to criticize the council. Despite being established by the Ministry of the Interior in 2005, the National Airborne Service Corps is still not fully operational and its equipment not fully upgraded.
Furthermore, the integration of its marine and land-based capabilities, which is based on Hong Kong’s Government Flying Service policy and dates back to 2003, has never been reviewed.
The corps was initially established with 37 aircraft. Today, there are only 15 left in service (excluding the Black Hawk helicopters on loan from the army). As a result of these cutbacks, the corps’ aerial photography capability is significantly diminished.
The corps provides the council’s Forestry Bureau with an airborne patrol, survey and aerial photography service.
However, the corps’ average task completion rate over 16 years is only 50 percent, some years even dropping below 30 percent.
An analysis of the flight time allocated to the corps’ five main task areas — in addition to airborne rescue, which accounts for 25 percent — shows that other tasks encompass a broad range of areas, including disaster surveying, emergency air support for major criminal investigations, ocean and coastal air patrol and rescue, providing traffic reports, measuring environmental pollution and providing aerial photography for a comprehensive national aerial survey.
Almost every activity is central to the national interest. Despite this, a budget for purchasing land survey aircraft was not included in the government’s Forward-looking Infrastructure Development Program.
In April last year, Academia Sinica, National Taiwan University’s atmospheric sciences department, Air Asia and the University of Bremen collaborated on research into air pollution in the Taiwan Strait and the East China and South China seas.
When the research group’s leader, University of Bremen’s John Burrows, and his team landed at Tainan Airport in a HALO Gulfstream G550 special research aircraft fitted with survey equipment, Taiwanese academics looked on with envy.
If the recommendation for the inclusion of similar aircraft in the development program had been accepted, it would surely have saved many lives and prevented losses to the agricultural and fishing industries caused by major weather events.
Wu Te-jung (吳德榮), an assistant professor at National Central University’s atmospheric sciences department, said that as Taiwan lacks a special observation aircraft, it must rely on satellite imagery for research and analysis.
Hopefully, the news that the council had to rely on Chinese satellite imagery will focus minds within the government and finally allow for Taiwan to operate a fleet of fixed-wing observation aircraft.
Chang Feng-lin is a doctoral student.
Translated by Edward Jones
Because much of what former US president Donald Trump says is unhinged and histrionic, it is tempting to dismiss all of it as bunk. Yet the potential future president has a populist knack for sounding alarums that resonate with the zeitgeist — for example, with growing anxiety about World War III and nuclear Armageddon. “We’re a failing nation,” Trump ranted during his US presidential debate against US Vice President Kamala Harris in one particularly meandering answer (the one that also recycled urban myths about immigrants eating cats). “And what, what’s going on here, you’re going to end up in World War
Earlier this month in Newsweek, President William Lai (賴清德) challenged the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to retake the territories lost to Russia in the 19th century rather than invade Taiwan. He stated: “If it is for the sake of territorial integrity, why doesn’t [the PRC] take back the lands occupied by Russia that were signed over in the treaty of Aigun?” This was a brilliant political move to finally state openly what many Chinese in both China and Taiwan have long been thinking about the lost territories in the Russian far east: The Russian far east should be “theirs.” Granted, Lai issued
On Tuesday, President William Lai (賴清德) met with a delegation from the Hoover Institution, a think tank based at Stanford University in California, to discuss strengthening US-Taiwan relations and enhancing peace and stability in the region. The delegation was led by James Ellis Jr, co-chair of the institution’s Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region project and former commander of the US Strategic Command. It also included former Australian minister for foreign affairs Marise Payne, influential US academics and other former policymakers. Think tank diplomacy is an important component of Taiwan’s efforts to maintain high-level dialogue with other nations with which it does
On Sept. 2, Elbridge Colby, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development, wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal called “The US and Taiwan Must Change Course” that defends his position that the US and Taiwan are not doing enough to deter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from taking Taiwan. Colby is correct, of course: the US and Taiwan need to do a lot more or the PRC will invade Taiwan like Russia did against Ukraine. The US and Taiwan have failed to prepare properly to deter war. The blame must fall on politicians and policymakers