An inter-ministerial meeting will be held to discuss when to stop scholarship payments to Sao Tomean students studying in Taiwan, including the children of the African nation’s president, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) said yesterday.
Speaking at a routine news conference at the ministry yesterday morning, International Cooperation and Development Fund Deputy Secretary-General Lee Pai-po (李柏浡) said there are 68 Sao Tomean students in Taiwan who are receiving scholarship payments from the foreign ministry, the Ministry of Education or the fund.
They include the daughter and son of Sao Tome and Principe President Evaristo Carvalho.
Carvalho’s daughter is a graduate student at National Yang Ming University, while his son is reportedly a doctoral student of information technology at National Chengchi University.
However, the university on Wednesday said that Carvalho’s son suspended his studies last year.
“We will discuss the situation of 68 [Sao Tomean] students and lay out some principles. We might [keep providing scholarship] until they finish a semester or a year of studies,” Lee said.
Lee added that despite the pending termination of scholarship payments, Sao Tomean students would still be permitted to finish their studies if they pay their own tuition.
He made the remarks one day after Sao Tome and Principe, a nation with a population of about 200,000, announced that it is cutting 19-year-old diplomatic ties with Taiwan, reducing the number of Taipei’s diplomatic allies to 21.
Minister of Foreign Affairs David Lee (李大維) on Wednesday said that Taipei’s denial of the African nation’s request for an “astronomical amount of financial aid” prompted the decision, while political parties attributed the incident to China and the government’s cross-strait policy.
Lee said the fund has a team of experts and a special project in Sao Tome and Principe that involve four professionals, two family members and five substitute military personnel, who would be withdrawn in two stages.
As for Taiwan’s property and assets in the African nation, Lee said they worth approximately NT$1.7 million (US$53,075) and the government is inclined to donate them to local organizations it has cooperated with.
With regard to the removal of Taiwan’s embassy in Sao Tome, foreign ministry spokeswoman Eleanor Wang (王珮玲) said there are four officials at the embassy, adding that there is no timetable for the removal process, but it would be completed as soon as possible.
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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