Taiwan should give up the Republic of China’s (ROC) conventional foreign policy framework that seeks to compete with Beijing for the “representation of China,” and should not concern itself with the number of diplomatic allies it has under that framework, former premier Yu Shyi-kun said yesterday.
“Taiwan’s diplomatic allies will show up when the ROC’s diplomatic allies have decreased in number. Only [Chinese President] Xi Jinping (習近平) should worry about the ROC’s diplomatic allies; we do not need to be troubled,” Yu said in response to Panama yesterday announcing that it was switching diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing.
Yu on Facebook yesterday reposted an opinion piece he wrote late last year when Saint Tome and Principe severed diplomatic ties with Taiwan.
According to the opinion piece, then-US president-elect Donald Trump’s verbal recognition of Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) as the president of Taiwan changed the situation for the nation, and the government should respond with a new diplomatic strategy.
Taiwan should dedicate amounts of money to international aid that are in accordance with UN policy and not waste its attention on maintaining a certain number of ROC diplomatic partners, he said.
The idea that the ROC’s sovereignty extends to “mainland” areas and that the ROC is in competition with the People’s Republic of China over the right to represent “China” should be abandoned, he said.
International politics is controlled by the hegemonic powers, and Taiwan should base its diplomacy on survival by dedicating its resources to cultivating ties with the US, Japan and the EU, he said.
Taiwan’s survival in the international arena should be the supreme directive of the nation’s diplomacy, Yu said, adding that Taiwan should pursue opportunities to participate in international organizations under the name “Taiwan” and encourage other states to recognize the nation without demanding that they to derecognize Beijing.
The strategy of encouraging recognition of Taiwan and China might serve as a deterrent to China undermining the ROC’s diplomatic partners, because such actions could lead to the recognition of Taiwan as a state, Yu said.
The Council of Agriculture yesterday signed a Taiwan-Australia Agricultural Cooperation Implementation clause to open a new export market for the nation’s pineapple crop. The clause is an addition to existing cooperation measures, it said. China on Friday last week abruptly announced that it would suspend pineapple imports from Taiwan starting on Monday, on grounds that it had on multiple occasions discovered “harmful organisms” in shipments of the fruit. The public and private sectors have since joined hands to purchase the local fruit to help the nation’s pineapple farmers. Canberra has requested that all pineapples for export to Australia have their crown buds removed,
A Tainan taxi driver is the Taiwanese with the longest name, after he last month changed it so that it now contains 25 characters, the Anping District Household Registration Office said. The 47-year-old man, formerly known as Huang Hsin-hsiang (黃鑫翔), applied for the name change on Feb. 26, in the hope that it would bring him good luck. His new name starts with Huang Da-lan (黃大嵐) and adds another 22 characters, meaning “Huang Da-lan is the blessed darling and sweetheart of the god of joy, god of wealth, god of misfortune, god of Earth and all the gods,” it said. With
POSSIBLE SIDE EFFECTS: As China attempted to promote its national image through humanitarian aid, its targets include New Southbound Policy countries, an expert said China’s “vaccine diplomacy,” which has become central to its foreign policy this year, might hamper Taiwan’s efforts to build relations with developing countries, an expert said. “China, as one of the few countries other than the United Kingdom and the United States to have produced a COVID-19 vaccine, will certainly use that as a diplomatic tool,” said Kung Shan-son (龔祥生), an assistant research fellow at the government-funded Institute for National Defense and Security Research. Beijing’s major goals in its “vaccine diplomacy” are to promote its national image through humanitarian aid and to solidify its relations with countries that are included in its
Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical Group might have lost its right to distribute the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for COVID-19 and the ability to fulfill a contract in Taiwan, civic groups Taiwan Citizen Front and the Economic Democracy Union said yesterday. In a radio interview on Feb. 17, Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), head of the Central Epidemic Command Center, said that last year, Taiwan was close to signing a contract to buy doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, but that the deal was halted at the last moment, with some speculating that Chinese interference was to blame. On Monday last week, the center