American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) Chairman Raymond Burghardt will arrive in Taipei tomorrow for a four-day visit, during which he will meet with President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), AIT said yesterday in a press release.
AIT declined to specify the purpose of Burghardt’s trip, but according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he will brief Taiwanese -officials on the latest developments regarding Chinese President Hu Jintao’s (胡錦濤) state visit to the US.
US President Barack Obama reaffirmed on Thursday, in a joint press conference with Hu and later in a US-China joint statement, that the US is committed to “a ‘one China’ policy based on the three US-China communiques and the Taiwan Relations Act.”
According to Taiwan’s top -representative in the US, Jason Yuan (袁健生), Washington briefed Taiwan on the visit prior to Hu’s arrival and agreed that in the future it would provide briefings both before and immediately after important US-China meetings.
Burghardt’s visit to Taiwan, which will last until Wednesday, will be the 10th he has made since being appointed AIT chairman in February 2006, the AIT statement said.
Burghardt, who was the director of AIT’s Taipei office from 1999 to 2001, will meet with several major political and business leaders during his stay, AIT said. He is currently the director of East-West Seminars at the East-West Center in Honalulu, Hawaii, a position he holds concurrently with his AIT chairmanship.
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