During a meeting with shipbuilders in Kaohsiung yesterday, president-elect Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) said that she is determined to have naval vessels built locally.
Accompanied by Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu (陳菊), policy director Chang Ching-sen (張景森) and Taiwan Institute of Economic Research vice president Kung Ming-hsin (龔明鑫), Tsai met with more than 20 shipbuilding business operators in a closed meeting.
“The national defense industry is one of the ‘five innovative industries’ and building naval vessels, especially submarines, is important,” Tsai told a news conference after the meeting. “We are not just talking, our policy team did its research before we started our tour around the nation to meet with representatives from each industry and we have some rough ideas already.”
Tsai said that the development of the national defense industry should go hand-in-hand with overall economic development and national defense capacity should be built up through innovation.
Taiwan had once ranked sixth globally in number of shipbuilding orders, she said.
Her plan would include reviving Kaohsiung’s once-prosperous shipbuilding industry through building naval vessels, followed by exploration of overseas markets, Tsai said.
Chen said that Kaohsiung, was once the center of shipbuilding in Taiwan, and the city welcomes Tsai’s plan to support the industry with government resources, since the industry has been fighting alone for too long.
Jong Shyn Shipbuilding chairman Han Pi-hsiang (韓碧祥), who is also the president of the Shipbuilders’ Association of Taiwan, welcomed Tsai’s determination.
“[Tsai’s plan] is like a heart-strengthening injection for the shipbuilding industry,” Han said. “In past decades, governments have repeatedly promised to build naval vessels, but their promises were never fulfilled, I hope they are realized this time.”
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened 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), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
RSS