The latest Cabinet reshuffle retains top economic and finance officials in their posts. Minister of Economic Affairs Wang Mei-hua (王美花), National Development Council Minister Kung Ming-hsin (龔明鑫), Financial Supervisory Commission Chairman Thomas Huang (黃天牧) and Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) Minister Chu Tzer-ming (朱澤民) are all to remain. President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) and former vice president Chen Chien-jen (陳建仁), who is to be sworn in as the new premier tomorrow, reportedly wanted them to complete unfinished tasks and maintain coherent policymaking.
This indicates that Tsai’s administration wants to formulate consistent and stable policies, reassure the business community and restore public confidence as the nation’s economy faces rising challenges this year. The DGBAS on Jan. 18 reported that Taiwan’s economy last quarter contracted 0.86 percent year-on-year, ending 26 straight quarters of annual growth, due to a sharp decline in exports. The downturn in external demand, including for semiconductors, dragged the nation’s GDP growth for last year to 2.43 percent, missing the government’s forecast of 3.06 percent and marking the slowest expansion in six years. The trend is likely to continue this quarter.
Nevertheless, the promotion of Chuang Tsui-yun (莊翠雲) to minister of finance from the deputy post — replacing Su Jain-rong (蘇建榮), who is returning to teaching at National Taipei University — came as a surprise to many. Previous finance ministers have mostly come from the fields of finance and taxation, while Chuang has a background in managing state-owned property. She is a graduate of National Chengchi University’s Department of Land Economics and worked in several positions at the National Property Administration for nearly three decades before taking the deputy finance minister’s office in 2016.
Chuang is also to become the agency’s third female minister, following Shirley Kuo (郭婉容), who served as minister from 1988 to 1990, and Kuo’s daughter, Christina Liu (劉憶如), who was minister for three months in 2012.
Chuang is known for promoting the auctioning of superficies rights for national properties and helping revitalize idle state-owned assets to boost the nation’s treasury, as well as her encouragement of private participation in national infrastructure projects through financing and tax benefits. Despite this experience, Chuang and the other ministers are likely to encounter more challenges than ever in the turbulent international environment that Taiwan is facing.
For instance, with the worsening of global demand due to high inflation and rapid monetary policy tightening by central banks, the government’s top priority in the short term should be to increase domestic demand and boost international travel.
Also, despite improved employment in the hospitality, food and beverage, transport and social work sectors, an essential task for new Cabinet members would be to assist low-income earners, small businesses and the manufacturing sector during the economic slowdown.
Other objectives are just as important, such as curbing speculation in the property market, ensuring fair wealth distribution, smoothing the transition to green energy, maintaining a steady pace toward net zero carbon emissions and joining the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership.
The new Cabinet should address these issues with pragmatic, effective measures.
However, one daunting task facing Chen’s Cabinet is how to maintain national resilience and functional governance amid rising political uncertainties in the run-up to the presidential and legislative elections early next year. Close collaboration between new and experienced ministers is certain to prove essential.
When 17,000 troops from the US, the Philippines, Australia, Japan, Canada, France and New Zealand spread across the Philippine archipelago for the Balikatan military exercise, running from tomorrow through May 8, the official language would be about interoperability, readiness and regional peace. However, the strategic subtext is becoming harder to ignore: The exercises are increasingly about the military geography around Taiwan. Balikatan has always carried political weight. This year, however, the exercise looks different in ways that matter not only to Manila and Washington, but also to Taipei. What began in 2023 as a shift toward a more serious deterrence posture
Reports about Elon Musk planning his own semiconductor fab have sparked anxiety, with some warning that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) could lose key customers to vertical integration. A closer reading suggests a more measured conclusion: Musk is advancing a strategic vision of in-house chip manufacturing, but remains far from replacing the existing foundry ecosystem. For TSMC, the short-term impact is limited; the medium-term challenge lies in supply diversification and pricing pressure, only in the long term could it evolve into a structural threat. The clearest signal is Musk’s announcement that Tesla and SpaceX plan to develop a fab project dubbed “Terafab”
China’s AI ecosystem has one defining difference from Silicon Valley: It is embrace of open source. While the US’ biggest companies race to build ever more powerful systems and insist only they can control them, Chinese labs have been giving the technology away for free. Open source — making a model available for anyone to use, download and build on — once seemed a niche, nerdy topic that no one besides developers cared about. However, when a new technology is driving trillions of dollars of investments and leading to immense concentrations of power, it offered an antidote. That is part of
In late January, Taiwan’s first indigenous submarine, the Hai Kun (海鯤, or Narwhal), completed its first submerged dive, reaching a depth of roughly 50m during trials in the waters off Kaohsiung. By March, it had managed a fifth dive, still well short of the deep-water and endurance tests required before the navy could accept the vessel. The original delivery deadline of November last year passed months ago. CSBC Corp, Taiwan, the lead contractor, now targets June and the Ministry of National Defense is levying daily penalties for every day the submarine remains unfinished. The Hai Kun was supposed to be
RSS