Minister of Foreign Affairs James Huang (黃志芳) said yesterday that while the public may focus on media reports about how well-paid the nation's diplomats are, they often overlook the difficulties and pressures diplomats face.
"Is there another government agency that needs to be responsible for Taiwan's official diplomatic relations with other countries?" Huang asked.
"If there are any changes in the country's diplomatic relations, the amount of pressure on our diplomats is tremendous. Some ambassadors even cannot sleep well at night because of the pressures," he said.
Huang made the remarks while taking questions from the press during the reception for new Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Katharine Chang (張小月).
Huang's statement was in response to a local media report that diplomats are being paid more for doing the same thing as the employees that the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) has sent overseas. TAITRA is a semi-official nonprofit organization that promotes foreign trade.
Huang said that the report was "unfair" to diplomats, because it only highlighted their salaries and perks, while glossing over the many hardships that they endured.
He said the public should consider the price diplomats pay for their high salaries.
"In Africa, for example, diplomats and their families face the threat of malaria, while in South America, they could get robbed or shot, or their residences, located near the presidential office and the ministry of the interior, could be affected if there is a coup," he said.
When asked whether Taiwan's diplomats in the US and Europe are enjoying better lives than their colleagues in Africa and South America, Huang said that there were still major problems, such as children's education issues.
"After diplomats' children start education in a certain country, when the parents are transferred to another culture and another education system, it becomes a torture for both parents and children," he said.
Huang said that he had seen diplomats sent to the US having to leave their children there for education when they were transferred to another post, and their children were too old to adopt another education system.
"Very often, the whole family can only get together during Christmas," he said.
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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