Taiwan could become a campaign issue in this year’s US presidential elections.
The Republican National Committee (RNC) is set to vote on a resolution this week at its annual winter meeting supporting Taiwanese democracy and “the timely sale of defensive arms.”
Introduced by Oklahoma committee member Carolyn McLarty with 22 co-sponsors, the resolution is expected to pass without difficulty.
It is based on wording from the Republican Party’s 2008 platform, which stated that the US “will help Taiwan defend itself.” A copy of the resolution will be sent to all Republican presidential candidates for guidance in future foreign policy debates.
“Taiwan is potentially the biggest foreign policy challenge that a new president will face, so we want our candidates to know our position and help them formulate their own,” Indiana RNC member James Bopp told the Washington Times.
“China may try to manipulate our foreign policy and become aggressive toward the rest of the world to distract attention from its own developing economic crisis,” he said.
The Washington Times commented: “Republicans have long been strong champions of democratic Taiwan, but the issue has barely emerged in the more than a dozen debates and hundreds of campaign events the presidential candidates have held.”
The newspaper added that backers of the resolution were “mystified” by their candidates’ silence on Taiwan, particularly as US President Barack Obama, a Democrat, has shown an “apparent indifference” to Taiwan’s security and the threat posed by Beijing.
“We would like this to be an issue for the candidates in debates. So far, it hasn’t been,” said Demetra DeMonte, another resolution co-sponsor.
The move comes as Daniel Twining, a senior fellow for Asia at the German Marshall Fund, has written an article for Foreign Policy magazine about the “gathering debate” in Washington over whether Taiwan is a spoiler rather than a partner in Obama’s new strategy to “pivot” towards Asia.
“Arguments to let Taiwan go, get strategy backwards. Cutting off an old US ally at a time of rising tensions with an assertive China, might do less to appease Beijing than to encourage its hopes to bully the US into a further retreat from its commitments in East Asia,” Twining wrote.
“Most importantly, it would resurrect the ghosts of Munich and Yalta, where great powers decided the fate of lesser nations without reference to their interests — or the human consequences of offering them up to satisfy the appetites of predatory great powers,” he wrote.
Taiwanese can file complaints with the Tourism Administration to report travel agencies if their activities caused termination of a person’s citizenship, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said yesterday, after a podcaster highlighted a case in which a person’s citizenship was canceled for receiving a single-use Chinese passport to enter Russia. The council is aware of incidents in which people who signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of Russia were told they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, Chiu told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Taipei. However, the travel agencies actually applied
Japanese footwear brand Onitsuka Tiger today issued a public apology and said it has suspended an employee amid allegations that the staff member discriminated against a Vietnamese customer at its Taipei 101 store. Posting on the social media platform Threads yesterday, a user said that an employee at the store said that “those shoes are very expensive” when her friend, who is a migrant worker from Vietnam, asked for assistance. The employee then ignored her until she asked again, to which she replied: "We don't have a size 37." The post had amassed nearly 26,000 likes and 916 comments as of this
New measures aimed at making Taiwan more attractive to foreign professionals came into effect this month, the National Development Council said yesterday. Among the changes, international students at Taiwanese universities would be able to work in Taiwan without a work permit in the two years after they graduate, explainer materials provided by the council said. In addition, foreign nationals who graduated from one of the world’s top 200 universities within the past five years can also apply for a two-year open work permit. Previously, those graduates would have needed to apply for a work permit using point-based criteria or have a Taiwanese company
The Shilin District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday indicted two Taiwanese and issued a wanted notice for Pete Liu (劉作虎), founder of Shenzhen-based smartphone manufacturer OnePlus Technology Co (萬普拉斯科技), for allegedly contravening the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例) by poaching 70 engineers in Taiwan. Liu allegedly traveled to Taiwan at the end of 2014 and met with a Taiwanese man surnamed Lin (林) to discuss establishing a mobile software research and development (R&D) team in Taiwan, prosecutors said. Without approval from the government, Lin, following Liu’s instructions, recruited more than 70 software
RSS