In response to requests from businesspeople, the Straits Exchange Foundation arranged an investment event in Kinmen County. No one would have expected that at least 18 senior representatives of a Taiwanese business association in China had been contacted by China’s Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO), which convinced them not to participate in the event.
The incident harkens back to a Chinese Communist Party propaganda article published in 2015 that tried to convince Li Ka-shing (李嘉誠), Hong Kong’s richest man, to keep his assets in China. Li, who had most of his assets in Hong Kong, started to off-load his major property investments in China, a move that triggered a series of discussions in Beijing. The Liaowang Institute, a think tank of Xinhua news agency, published an article accusing Li of abandoning his benefactor upon achieving his goal, especially at a sensitive moment when China’s economy was at risk.
Today, China’s economy is again facing crisis. How does Beijing interpret the moves of Taiwanese businesspeople who have been trying to bring their investments back to Taiwan? They want to diversify their risk, but Beijing has prevented them from doing so. It is clear that China is playing the same old trick.
Meanwhile, the TAO’s recent move over the Kinmen event is contradictory. The county has been ruled by the pan-blue camp for years, and locals tend to welcome communication with China, a much different attitude from that of other areas in Taiwan. Even so, Beijing dealt with the matter bluntly, preventing locals from benefiting and stopping Taiwanese businesspeople from investing in Kinmen. Obviously, Beijing has been playing a double game. Its previous proposals to win over Kinmen residents were sugarcoated and could not be trusted.
Huang Wei-ping is a former think tank researcher.
Translated by Emma Liu
Taiwan should reject two flawed answers to the Eswatini controversy: that diplomatic allies no longer matter, or that they must be preserved at any cost. The sustainable answer is to maintain formal diplomatic relations while redesigning development relationships around transparency, local ownership and democratic accountability. President William Lai’s (賴清德) canceled trip to Eswatini has elicited two predictable reactions in Taiwan. One camp has argued that the episode proves Taiwan must double down on support for every remaining diplomatic ally, because Beijing is tightening the screws, and formal recognition is too scarce to risk. The other says the opposite: If maintaining
India’s semiconductor strategy is undergoing a quiet, but significant, recalibration. With the rollout of India Semiconductor Mission (ISM) 2.0, New Delhi is signaling a shift away from ambition-driven leaps toward a more grounded, capability-led approach rooted in industrial realities and institutional learning. Rather than attempting to enter the most advanced nodes immediately, India has chosen to prioritize mature technologies in the 28-nanometer to 65-nanometer range. That would not be a retreat, but a strategic alignment with domestic capabilities, market demand and global supply chain gaps. The shift carries the imprimatur of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, indicating that the recalibration is
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), during an interview for the podcast Lanshuan Time (蘭萱時間) released on Monday, said that a US professor had said that she deserved to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize following her meeting earlier this month with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平). Cheng’s “journey of peace” has garnered attention from overseas and from within Taiwan. The latest My Formosa poll, conducted last week after the Cheng-Xi meeting, shows that Cheng’s approval rating is 31.5 percent, up 7.6 percentage points compared with the month before. The same poll showed that 44.5 percent of respondents
China last week announced that it picked two Pakistani astronauts for its Tiangong space station mission, indicating the maturation of the two nations’ relationship from terrestrial infrastructure cooperation to extraterrestrial strategic domains. For Taiwan and India, the developments present an opportunity for democratic collaboration in space, particularly regarding dual-use technologies and the normative frameworks for outer space governance. Sino-Pakistani space cooperation dates back to the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, with a cooperative agreement between the Pakistani Space & Upper Atmosphere Research Commission, and the Chinese Ministry of Aerospace Industry. Space cooperation was integrated into the China-Pakistan
RSS