Hong Kong pro-democracy advocates and budding politicians have flocked to Taiwan this week to observe its elections.
One delegation of about 50, including a batch of young Hong Kong district councilors who stormed to a landslide electoral victory in November last year, has been networking with key civil leaders, academics and officials.
“We want to learn and gain more experience, to help Hong Kong people as they struggle on their democratic road in the future,” said Raymond Tang (鄧威文), a district councilor who attended an evening seminar in Taipei with fellow delegates on countering fake news.
Photo: CNA
The links between the two places have never been deeper: Hong Kong has been convulsed by more than seven months of anti-China protests and Taiwan’s elections come amid heightened fears of an increasingly assertive China under President Xi Jinping (習近平).
“There’s an acute sense of threat from China. What’s happened in Hong Kong has made everyone reassess its relationship with Beijing,” said Joseph Cheng (鄭宇碩), a veteran pro-democracy advocate and one of the delegation leaders.
“Democracy has taken root in Taiwan and it refutes the basic argument that democracy is for the West, that it doesn’t apply to Chinese people, which is the argument propagated by Beijing,” he added.
In a Facebook video posted late on Thursday, 15 district councilors from Hong Kong, urged Taiwanese to treasure their unfettered democracy and to vote today.
“This time it’s over to you,” they said in a montage. “Hong Kong and Taiwan, let’s go for it together.”
Taiwan has become home to a small, but growing number of Hong Kong protesters who have fled the territory fearing politically motivated charges against them.
About 6,200 immigrants from Hong Kong and Macau are eligible to vote in Taiwan.
Lam Wing-kei (林榮基), a Hong Kong bookseller once abducted by Chinese agents, is trying to rebuild his life in Taiwan opening a new bookstore, set to open in March.
Lam said he is optimistic because of the burgeoning intellectual and political ties between Taiwan and his home.
“What we’re seeing in Taiwan is a country facing a military threat and economic encroachments from China. This is not a good combination and it perpetuates uncertainty,” he said, standing in an empty store space that he plans to fill with thousands of books focused on politics in Taiwan, Hong Kong and China.
“I hope my bookshop can make a little difference, to influence Taiwan, and raise their awareness,” Lam added.
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
RSS