Taiwan will inaugurate a WTO research center on Sept. 8 to draft various initiatives to be presented to the organization, Cabinet sources said yesterday.
The new think tank will be managed by the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CHIER), the sources said, adding that all relevant government agencies will help finance the new center.
In addition to initiating proposals to be referred to formal WTO conferences for discussion, the center will also offer legal counseling and assist the government in handling trade disputes under the WTO framework and in cultivating human resources.
Since Taiwan became a WTO member, the sources said, the government has been mulling over how to more actively participate in the organization's activities and how to more effectively cope with the impact of trade liberalization.
Moreover, the sources said, WTO negotiations have evolved from bilateral consultations on market opening issues to multilateral talks on complicated, dynamic regional economic integration topics.
The new center is expected to help the government craft innovative, forward-looking strategies to sustain the nation's market niches in the international trade and economic arenas, the sources said.
CHIER president Chen Tien-chih (陳添枝) said the center will be staffed by scores of international trade and legal experts from the CHIER and other domestic think tanks and universities.
On the center's inaugural day, Chen said, a special WTO databank will be posted on the Internet, which will be connected to the WTO's official Web site, while a library will also be inaugurated.
Chen said CHIER will also organize a WTO retrospective show on that day, featuring documents, graphics and photos.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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