The EU's experiences with regional integration hold lessons for Taiwan and China, not as a finished product, but as an ongoing process, according to the Mainland Affairs Council's new vice chairman, David Huang (黃偉峰).
Huang spoke with reporters yesterday in his capacity as vice chairman for the first time yesterday, explaining the challenges involved in implementing the EU's integration model in East Asia as a possible solution to the cross-strait political stalemate.
Huang, who previously worked at the Academia Sinica's European and American Studies Institute, has been hailed by council officials as an expert on European political structures and procedures and is expected to take on some of the responsibility for relaying the government's stance on cross-strait relations to visiting US and European officials.
Huang will oversee the work of the council's department of educational and cultural affairs, as well as its policy planning department.
"European integration is a process, and the results of that process are unknown. It is a trade-off, but the process is better than an approach that begins with a specific end determined beforehand," Huang said.
"In a democratic society, you can't know for sure what the finished product will look like, because it rests in the hands of the constituency. You can't promise a particular end," he said.
According to Huang, cross-strait relations could benefit from the EU model despite the difficulties involved, saying the application of the EU model in Taiwan was an option that was gradually "maturing."
Huang echoed the president's Double Ten National Day speech by saying political differences should be put aside to enable economic cooperation.
"First economic concerns, then the political. This is the same as the call for negotiations on practical, concrete issues. It is pushing politics aside," Huang said.
Council Vice Chairman Chiu Tai-san (邱太三), who is also the council's spokesman, yesterday reiterated the council's stance on the possibility of negotiations with China on charter flights over the Lunar New Year.
"We think that there is still a chance that China will agree to negotiate over cross-strait charter flights for the holidays ... From previous experience, we feel that China has left the question open," Chiu said.
Chiu said that, although China's Taiwan Affairs Office spokesman Zhang Mingqing (張銘清) had called the chartered flights domestic routes last Thursday in response to the president's Double Ten National Day speech, the matter had yet to be decided.
He said that China was probably unwilling to make any concessions before Taiwan's year-end legislative elections.
Chiu referred to the charter flights as cross-strait routes, avoiding the more controversial alternatives of designating the flight paths as either domestic or international routes.
While Huang pointed to the large amount of distortion brought about by the cross-strait "signaling game" that relied on the indirect relaying of dialogue through the media, he described himself as an optimist, saying that the council has begun to train personnel in anticipation of future opportunities for conducting negotiations with China.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods