A Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislator yesterday accused China of pressuring Indonesia not to buy Taiwan-made fishing boats.
DPP Legislator Kuan Bi-ling (管碧玲) told a press conference that Taiwan’s fishing boat building industry had in the past made many boats for Indonesian companies, but since the beginning of this year, Indonesia has not placed any orders because China has been pressuring it via ASEAN not to buy Taiwan-made fishing boats.
Kuan said the action had seriously harmed Taiwan’s boat building industry because since Taiwan’s fisheries had shrunk, the industry now relied on Indonesia and other Southeast Asian counties to place orders.
“Even as Beijing moves to sign an economic cooperation framework agreement [ECFA] with Taiwan and enhance trade between the two sides, it is trying to bar Taiwan from expanding trade links with other countries,” Kuan said.
Still, the government seems unaware of China’s intentions, she said.
Kuan said she brought the issue to the attention of the Council of Agriculture’s Fisheries Bureau. The bureau asked Indonesia about the matter and found evidence suggesting that Beijing had used ASEAN to pressure Jakarta not to buy boats from Taiwan.
The legislator said the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Economic Affairs had told her they had not heard anything about the matter.
Meanwhile, Huang Ming-cheng (黃明正), the owner of Shing Sheng Fa Boat Building Company (新昇發造船廠) in Kaohsiung, told the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper) that his company had made numerous fiberglass-reinforced-polyester boats for Indonesian fisheries in the past at an average price of NT$30 million (US$1 million) per unit, but that his Indonesian customers had not placed any orders recently because of pressure from China.
The military has spotted two Chinese warships operating in waters near Penghu County in the Taiwan Strait and sent its own naval and air forces to monitor the vessels, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) said. Beijing sends warships and warplanes into the waters and skies around Taiwan on an almost daily basis, drawing condemnation from Taipei. While the ministry offers daily updates on the locations of Chinese military aircraft, it only rarely gives details of where Chinese warships are operating, generally only when it detects aircraft carriers, as happened last week. A Chinese destroyer and a frigate entered waters to the southwest
A magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck off the coast of Yilan County at 8:39pm tonight, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said, with no immediate reports of damage or injuries. The epicenter was 38.7km east-northeast of Yilan County Hall at a focal depth of 98.3km, the CWA’s Seismological Center said. The quake’s maximum intensity, which gauges the actual physical effect of a seismic event, was a level 4 on Taiwan’s 7-tier intensity scale, the center said. That intensity level was recorded in Yilan County’s Nanao Township (南澳), Hsinchu County’s Guansi Township (關西), Nantou County’s Hehuanshan (合歡山) and Hualien County’s Yanliao (鹽寮). An intensity of 3 was
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s comment last year on Tokyo’s potential reaction to a Taiwan-China conflict has forced Beijing to rewrite its invasion plans, a retired Japanese general said. Takaichi told the Diet on Nov. 7 last year that a Chinese naval blockade or military attack on Taiwan could constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan, potentially allowing Tokyo to exercise its right to collective self-defense. Former Japan Ground Self-Defense Force general Kiyofumi Ogawa said in a recent speech that the remark has been interpreted as meaning Japan could intervene in the early stages of a Taiwan Strait conflict, undermining China’s previous assumptions
Instead of focusing solely on the threat of a full-scale military invasion, the US and its allies must prepare for a potential Chinese “quarantine” of Taiwan enforced through customs inspections, Stanford University Hoover fellow Eyck Freymann said in a Foreign Affairs article published on Wednesday. China could use various “gray zone” tactics in “reconfiguring the regional and ultimately the global economic order without a war,” said Freymann, who is also a nonresident research fellow at the US Naval War College. China might seize control of Taiwan’s links to the outside world by requiring all flights and ships entering or leaving Taiwan
RSS