Although Taiwan and China have both been left out of the world’s largest naval exercise hosted by the US, the reasons for their exclusion are very different, a Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson said yesterday.
The biennial Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) maritime military exercises under way in Hawaii are the largest since their inception in 1971, with 22 countries, from Japan to Tonga and from Russia to Chile, participating in a five-week series of drills.
Responding to media inquiries at a routine press briefing, Bruce Linghu (令狐榮達), director-general of the Department of North American Affairs at the ministry, said the reason Taiwan was not invited to participate in the exercise seemed clear.
The US evidently did not think the time was ripe to invite Taiwan to take part in a multilateral mechanism like RIMPAC in the absence of official diplomatic relations between the two countries and was concerned about how China would react to any such invitation, Linghu said.
Nonetheless, military cooperation and strategic dialogue between Taiwan and the US have been close, he added.
Linghu said he was not in a position to comment on why China was not invited to take part in the exercise because it was a decision pertaining to US military policy.
However, the reasons the US did not invite Taiwan and China “were two different things,” he said.
Asked to comment on the view expressed by some US analysts that Taiwan should be abandoned to pursue a better US-China relationship, Linghu said that such a view in no way represented mainstream thinking on the US’ Taiwan policy.
“Various US government officials have characterized Taiwan as an economic and security ally of the US at different occasions. In addition, Taiwan is one of the countries that shares the same values as the US,” he said.
Asked about the US position on the Diaoyutai Islands (釣魚台), known as the Senkaku Islands in Japanese, Linghu said the contention by the US that the dispute falls within the scope of Article 5 of the 1960 US-Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security did not in any way affect Taiwan’s sovereignty claims over the area.
Although Washington takes no position on which state has sovereignty over the Diaoyutai Islands, it has held the position that the Diaoyutai Islands are under -Japanese administration control since the US handed back Okinawa to Japan in 1971.
“The Republic of China maintains that it has sovereignty, as well as administrative jurisdictional power, over the Diaoyutai Islands. We have clearly expressed our position to the US and Japan since 1971 and that position has not changed,” Linghu said.
PROVOCATIVE: Chinese Deputy Ambassador to the UN Sun Lei accused Japan of sending military vessels to deliberately provoke tensions in the Taiwan Strait China denounced remarks by Japan and the EU about the South China Sea at a UN Security Council meeting on Monday, and accused Tokyo of provocative behavior in the Taiwan Strait and planning military expansion. Ayano Kunimitsu, a Japanese vice foreign minister, told the Council meeting on maritime security that Tokyo was seriously concerned about the situation in the East China and South China seas, and reiterated Japan’s opposition to any attempt to change the “status quo” by force, and obstruction of freedom of navigation and overflight. Stavros Lambrinidis, head of the EU delegation to the UN, also highlighted South China Sea
SILENCING CRITICS: In addition to blocking Taiwan, China aimed to prevent rights activists from speaking out against authoritarian states, a Cabinet department said The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) yesterday condemned transnational repression by Beijing after RightsCon, a major digital human rights conference scheduled to be held in Zambia this week, was abruptly canceled due to Chinese pressure over Taiwanese participation. This year’s RightsCon, the world’s largest conference discussing issues “at the intersection of human rights and technology,” was scheduled to take place from tomorrow to Friday in Lusaka, and expected to draw 2,600 in-person attendees from 150 countries, along with 1,100 online participants. However, organizers were forced to cancel the event due to behind-the-scenes pressure from China, the ministry said, expressing its “strongest condemnation”
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, said it expects its 2-nanometer (2nm) chip capacity to grow at a compound annual rate of 70 percent from this year to 2028. The projection comes as five fabs begin volume production of 2-nanometer chips this year — two in Hsinchu and three in Kaohsiung — TSMC senior vice president and deputy cochief operating officer Cliff Hou (侯永清) said at the company’s annual technology symposium in Silicon Valley, California, last week. Output in the first year of 2-nanometer production, which began in the fourth quarter of last year, is expected to
Taiwan’s economy grew far faster than expected in the first quarter, as booming demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications drove a surge in exports, spilling over into investment and consumption, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. GDP growth was 13.69 percent year-on-year during the January-to-March period, beating the DGBAS’ February forecast by 2.23 percentage points and marking the most robust growth in nearly four decades, DGBAS senior official Chiang Hsin-yi (江心怡) told a news conference in Taipei. The result was powered by exports, which remain the backbone of Taiwan’s economy, Chiang said. Outbound shipments jumped 51.12 percent year-on-year to
RSS