Taiwan needs to do more to sell itself to the world, for example by publicizing its achievements in various fields and calling attention to China’s bullying in international media, former American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) director William Stanton said.
He made the remark at a forum in Taipei yesterday when asked how Taiwan should respond to China’s threats in Beijing’s bid to becoming a global hegemony.
“I think you need to undertake much more imaginative public relations with the international community versus what is advocated to people in government,” Stanton said at the forum on Taiwan-US-China relations hosted by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Jason Hsu (許毓仁).
Photo courtesy of William Stanton
The government could take out full-page advertisements in major newspapers, such as the New York Times, to remind people of what Taiwan has accomplished, he said.
“Taiwan has moved from poverty to prosperity and from a military dictatorship to one of the strongest democracies in the world in just more than 30 years,” Stanton said.
“You rank fourth globally on the Programme for International Student Assessment,” he said. “You rank higher than the US in press freedom and higher than many European countries in academic freedom. You are also ranked one of the safest places in the world, both in terms of countries and cities.”
However, most people he had spoken with do not recognize how high Taiwan ranks in those fields, he added.
“Remind people of what’s at stake if you become just another part of the People’s Republic of China and you wind up like Hong Kong. Remind people of what you’ve achieved on your own. Make the case for why you are important and why the world should care about you,” Stanton said.
Citing as an example threats of a Chinese boycott against Taiwanese coffee bakery chain 85°C (85度C) because an employee at one of its US branches “asked President Tsai Ing-wen [蔡英文] to sign a pillow,” Stanton said the government should respond to such bullying tactics by running full-page editorials in international media explaining the overtures it has made over the past few years, the offers for reasonable conversations and the responses from China to try to bully Taiwanese.
He also cited China’s pressuring of Taiwanese K-pop idol Chou Tzu-yu (周子瑜) in 2016 into issuing an apology for briefly holding up a Republic of China flag on a South Korean variety TV show; its attempt to bar a Taiwanese student from attending a model UN meeting in New York; and Beijing driving away two Fisheries Agency officials at a 2016 UN Food and Agriculture Organization Committee on Fisheries meeting in Rome “because Taiwan is not a country,” saying that all such bullying against Taiwan deserves the attention of the international community.
“There’s many ways in which you can portray yourselves in the positive light you deserve,” Stanton said.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers have declared they survived recall votes to remove them from office today, although official results are still pending as the vote counting continues. Although final tallies from the Central Election Commission (CEC) are still pending, preliminary results indicate that the recall campaigns against all seven KMT lawmakers have fallen short. As of 6:10 pm, Taichung Legislators Yen Kuan-heng (顏寬恒) and Yang Chiung-ying (楊瓊瓔), Hsinchu County Legislator Lin Szu-ming (林思銘), Nantou County Legislator Ma Wen-chun (馬文君) and New Taipei City Legislator Lo Ming-tsai (羅明才) had all announced they
CHAMPIONS: President Lai congratulated the players’ outstanding performance, cheering them for marking a new milestone in the nation’s baseball history Taiwan on Sunday won their first Little League Baseball World Series (LLBWS) title in 29 years, as Taipei’s Dong Yuan Elementary School defeated a team from Las Vegas 7-0 in the championship game in South Williamsport, Pennsylvania. It was Taiwan’s first championship in the annual tournament since 1996, ending a nearly three-decade drought. “It has been a very long time ... and we finally made it,” Taiwan manager Lai Min-nan (賴敏男) said after the game. Lai said he last managed a Dong Yuan team in at the South Williamsport in 2015, when they were eliminated after four games. “There is
POWER PLANT POLL: The TPP said the number of ‘yes’ votes showed that the energy policy should be corrected, and the KMT said the result was a win for the people’s voice The government does not rule out advanced nuclear energy generation if it meets the government’s three prerequisites, President William Lai (賴清德) said last night after the number of votes in favor of restarting a nuclear power plant outnumbered the “no” votes in a referendum yesterday. The referendum failed to pass, despite getting more “yes” votes, as the Referendum Act (公民投票法) states that the vote would only pass if the votes in favor account for more than one-fourth of the total number of eligible voters and outnumber the opposing votes. Yesterday’s referendum question was: “Do you agree that the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) yesterday visited Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), as the chipmaker prepares for volume production of Nvidia’s next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) chips. It was Huang’s third trip to Taiwan this year, indicating that Nvidia’s supply chain is deeply connected to Taiwan. Its partners also include packager Siliconware Precision Industries Co (矽品精密) and server makers Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) and Quanta Computer Inc (廣達). “My main purpose is to visit TSMC,” Huang said yesterday. “As you know, we have next-generation architecture called Rubin. Rubin is very advanced. We have now taped out six brand new
RSS