President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday touted the country’s close ties trade and tourism with Japan and said he expected the new Association of East Asian Relations (AEAR) chairman to help promote stronger bilateral relations.
At a meeting with an economic group from Japan’s Fukui Prefecture, Ma cited the number of Japanese tourists who visited Taiwan last year, which reached 1.29 million, and said the growing number of tourists showed the continued development of Taiwan-Japan relations.
The appointment of former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) secretary-general Liao Liou-yi (廖了以) as head of the AEAR should help boost relations between the two nations, Ma said.
“Taiwan and Japan do not have formal diplomatic ties, but the two countries share a special partnership because of close non-official ties in trade, tourism and transportation,” Ma said at the Presidential Office.
The AEAR is a major platform that handles bilateral relations between Taipei and Tokyo after diplomatic ties between the two countries was severed in 1972.
Liao, who has also served as Presidential Office secretary-general and interior minister, has a unique familiarity with Japanese affairs because his mother is Japanese, Ma said.
Ma said as Taiwan’s second-largest trading partner, Japan invested more than US$400 million in Taiwan last year, while Taiwan’s investment in Japan reached US$250 million during the same period, helping bring the total investment between the two countries to NT$70 billion (US$2.4 billion).
Last year, Taipei and Tokyo signed an investment pact after more than 12 months of negotiations. Ma described the pact as the most important economic agreement between the two countries in 60 years.
“We also signed an open-skies agreement with Japan last year, which promotes air transportation between the two countries,” Ma said. “We expect the bilateral relations to continue to grow.”
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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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