Taiwan has pledged US$700,000 in additional funding for APEC forum member initiatives to enhance human security and establish greater economic integration across the Asia-Pacific region, the APEC Secretariat said in a statement yesterday.
A memorandum of understanding on the contribution was signed in Cebu by officials from Taiwan and the APEC Secretariat in Singapore — which administers member projects that put the policy directives of the region’s leaders and ministers into action — during the Third APEC Senior Officials’ Meeting (SOM3) in the Philippine city.
The donation is to fund projects through the remainder of the year, including those advanced by the SOM3 to build secure, inclusive trade and growth among member economies. It is also to fund research conducted by the APEC Policy Support Unit to bolster joint work toward these goals, the statement said.
“Chinese Taipei is seeking to build the capacity of APEC members to mitigate shared threats to people and society, and advance regional economic integration,” said Michael Hsu (徐佩勇), APEC senior official for Chinese Taipei — the name Taiwan uses in international settings.
APEC members fund about 100 projects annually to bridge knowledge and resource gaps between them and realize common objectives, the statement said. Last year, they contributed US$9 million toward projects such as technical workshops, training sessions and research.
Taiwan is driving capacity-building projects to improve natural-disaster resilience and business resumption in APEC economies, it said.
It is boosting APEC work to improve food safety across supply chains, as well as energy security, it said.
To promote startup growth and commercial innovation, it will host officials for small and medium-sized enterprises, private investors and next-generation tech entrepreneurs in Taipei next month at the APEC Accelerator Network Summit and Global Challenge for Early Stage Investment, the statement 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:
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