Taiwan is studying a bid to host a top meeting of Central America’s main regional bank, people with knowledge of the matter said, in its latest effort to break China’s diplomatic squeeze.
The nation is considering applying to host the 60th annual board meeting of the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI) next year, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the details have not been made public.
The bank is one of the few international organizations of which Taiwan is a full member under its official name, the Republic of China.
The lender is scheduled to decide on the host for next year at its board meeting in Argentina next month.
A decision to host the board meeting in Taiwan could prompt an angry response from China, which has increased pressure on countries and multinational companies to avoid any actions that could imply sovereign status for Taiwan.
The Chinese Communist Party views Taiwan as part of Chinese territory and routinely blocks its participation in most international organizations.
China has learned of Taiwan’s wish to host the meeting and is lobbying its allies in the region, including Cuba and Panama, to block the bid, people with knowledge of the matter said.
China is also in talks with members of CABEI to join the organization, with one of its main conditions being that the bank drop its recognition of Taiwan as a separate nation, the people said.
Taiwan, which holds a 10 percent stake in the bank, needs members holding at least two-thirds of the lender’s shares to support its proposal to host the meeting.
Another person said that the Ministry of Finance was close to deciding whether to officially submit a bid, but was uncertain whether Taiwan could muster sufficient support among the other members.
A bid would also need to be agreed to by President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) and Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌).
Latin American and Caribbean nations have long been a stronghold of diplomatic support for Taiwan, favoring official ties with the nation over China.
While four of the bank’s 13 other members officially recognize Taiwan, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic and Panama have switched recognition to Beijing since Tsai was elected in May 2016.
Minister of Finance Su Jain-rong (蘇建榮) represents Taiwan on the bank’s board.
A spokesman for the ministry declined to comment.
Taiwan, along with the likes of Argentina, Mexico and Spain, is one of six members of the bank from outside Central America and its only Asian member.
Taipei last hosted a board meeting in 1995.
CABEI is one of the supranational institutions able to issue bonds in Taiwan. Since 2014, it has issued approximately US$1.1 billion of notes.
STATE SUBSIDIES: The talks over a factory in Dresden have a top end on par with what Japan is offering TSMC and outdo a cap other firms are being offered in Europe Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s biggest contract chipmaker, is in talks to receive German government subsidies for as much as 50 percent of the costs to build a new semiconductor fab in the country, people familiar with the matter said. The government is in ongoing negotiations with TSMC, as well as its partners on the project — Bosch Ltd, NXP Semiconductors NV and Infineon Technologies AG — the people said, asking not to be identified because the deliberations are private. No final decisions have been made and the final subsidy amount could still change. Any state aid must also
South Korea would avoid capitalizing on China’s ban on a US chipmaker, seeing the move by Beijing as an attempt to drive a wedge between Seoul and Washington, a person familiar with the situation said. The South Korean government would not encourage its memorychip firms to grab market share in China lost by Micron Technology Inc, which has been barred for use in critical industries by Beijing on national security grounds, the person said. China is the biggest market for South Korea semiconductor firms Samsung Electronics Co and SK Hynix Inc and home to some of their factories. Their operations in China
GEOPOLITICAL RISKS: The company has a deep collaboration with TSMC, but it is also open to working with Samsung Electronics Co and Intel Corp, Nvidia’s CEO said Nvidia Corp, the world’s biggest artificial intelligence (AI) GPU supplier, yesterday said that it is diversifying its supply chain partners in order to enhance supply chain resilience amid geopolitical tensions. “All of our supply chain is designed for maximum diversity and redundancy so that we can have resilience. Our company is very big and so we have a lot of customers depending on us. And so our supply chain resilience is very important to us. We manufacture in as many places as we can,” Nvidia founder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said in response to a reporter’s question in
BIG MARKET: As growth in the number of devices and data traffic accelerates, it will not be possible to send everything to the cloud, a Qualcomm executive said Qualcomm Inc is betting the future of artificial intelligence (AI) will require more computing power than what the cloud alone can provide. The world’s largest maker of smartphone processors is transitioning from a communications company into an “intelligent edge computing” firm, Qualcomm senior vice president Alex Katouzian said. The edge in question is the mobile device that a user taps to access a network or service, and Katouzian used his time headlining one of the major keynote events at the Computex show in Taipei to make the case for how big a market that would be. The US company’s chips help smartphones harness
RSS