Taiwan should diversify its engagements with nations in the region other than China to play a more active role as a good regional and global citizen, former US assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs Kurt Campbell said at an international conference held in Taipei yesterday.
“Alternatively, I would like to see a degree of diversification with respect to Taiwan’s role in the region,” Campbell said to attendees at the luncheon. “Taiwan has built much deeper ties with China in the last five years. We support that, but we would also like to see… stronger ties between Taiwan and Japan, [South] Korea, the Philippines, India and other countries in the world.”
Chairman and chief executive officer of The Asia Group, Campbell was invited to deliver a keynote speech at a symposium titled New Asian Dynamics and the role of Taiwan that was jointly hosted in Taipei by the Taiwan Brain Trust and the Washington-based think tank the Project 2049 Institute.
In answering questions, Campbell sympathized with concerns regarding Taiwan’s international status, saying: “I do believe that Taiwan has experienced a degree of isolation and a lack of strategic respect. That is problematic.”
“It’s important to treat Taiwan internationally with respect and to allow it to play an important role… and I believe that it can be done within the context of improving relations between China and Taiwan,” he added.
At a panel, Project 2049 Institute chairman Randy Schriver praised Taiwan’s offers of humanitarian aid to victims of attacks by the Islamic State, and in donating funds and equipment to combat the Ebola outbreak, saying that the US should continue to create ways to help Taiwan promote good regional and global citizenship.
In some cases, the US risks its relationship with China because China is often opposed to those activities, former US deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Schriver said. “But we need to do that, because we are better off when Taiwan plays a primary role in regional and global affairs.”
The challenges China presents require a regional response, a common operating picture, integration of threat data, whether that be maritime, air, or subsurface, Schriver said, urging the US to provide Taiwan with diesel-electric submarines — in accordance with the decision the US made in 2001 — or to assist its indigenous submarine program, and promote Taiwan’s role in regional security.
Madhav Das Nalapat, director of the Department of Geopolitics and International Relations at Manipal University in India, said that from an economic point of view, Taiwan, a knowledge-based economy, “is an extremely desirable partner for India to have.”
“One problem we have seen here in Taiwan, quite frankly, is a lot of R&D [research and development] is now being utilized by China. A lot of Chinese R&D is sourced from Taiwan,” Nalapat said.
Taiwan needs to interact with India as actively as with China, develop R&D facilities in India and have Indian R&D experts come to Taiwan, he said.
“Countries like India or Brazil, we can be as valuable an R&D partner for Taiwan as China has been,” Nalapat said. “Even more valuable is that I have never heard of India having a missile that has ever been pointed at Taiwan.”
National Tsing Hua University interim senior vice president and former director of the American Institute in Taiwan William Stanton brought up the issue of maritime disputes.
Taiwan should seriously consider basing its claims in the South China Sea as well as for the islands and reefs it already has under its control on the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea , rather than the 11-dash line, because the dashes have never been explained or justified, Stanton said.
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