Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) presidential primary candidate Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) has proposed using “smart power” combined with “pragmatic diplomacy” as the way to handle Taiwan’s diplomatic plight.
According to Su’s office spokesperson Lee Hou-ching (李厚慶), Su felt that for the nation’s diplomacy to change for the better, there must be three strategies — smart power that surpasses hard power, a soft power pragmatic management approach and clear-cut diplomatic strategic guiding principles.
Smart power is a concept introduced by Harvard University international relations professor Joseph Nye as the ability to combine hard and soft power into a winning strategy.
US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton also used the term during her US Senate confirmation hearing on Jan. 13, 2009.
“We must use what has been called smart power — the full range of tools at our disposal — diplomatic, economic, military, political, legal and cultural — picking the right tool, or combination of tools, for each situation. With smart power, diplomacy will be the vanguard of foreign policy,” she said.
According to Su, Taiwan’s diplomacy should be practical and establish “grassroots-like” diplomacy that applies resources to work relating to public diplomacy and international non-governmental organizations. These approaches allow pragmatic progress without being seen as ramming and maintain the nation’s interests without provoking others, Su said.
Sources wishing to remain anonymous said that Su had met with former Singaporean prime minister Lee Kwan Yew (李光耀) twice during the latter’s low-key visit to Taiwan this last week.
The source said Su and his wife, Chan Hsiu-ling (詹秀齡), had lunch with Lee and his family on Tuesday, then Su met with Lee alone the following day.
According to sources, Lee expressed approval of Su’s concept of pragmatic diplomacy and thought that Su’s proposal of “smart power” was a brilliantly elucidated point of view.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching