What Taiwan gained from the program was not what its officers learned of military techniques, but “the strong bonds it built between the two countries,” he said.
In the early 2000s, several requests by Beijing that Seoul end the exchange program with Taipei were bluntly turned down by South Korean military leaders, who themselves had studied in Taiwan as part of the program, he said.
A paper published in October by Hwang Jaeho, a professor of international studies at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, said the exchange program had been an impediment for South Korea in achieving a strategic cooperative partnership with China, a goal his country has been pursuing since South Korean President Lee Myung-bak visited Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) in 2008.
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