Taiwan and Israel are developing close trade and high-tech ties under the watchful eyes of China which fears Taipei and Tel Aviv are secretly nurturing political and military ties.
Since exchanging trade offices in 1993, Taiwan and Israel have doubled trade from US$500 million in 1997 to US$1 billion last year, with a strong emphasis on high-tech imports and exports.
The peak in bilateral trade occurred in 2004 when two-way trade rose 64 percent. Two-way trade last year hit US$1.3 billion, up 5 percent year-on-year, according to the Bureau of Foreign Trade.
Last month Taiwan and Israel signed a scientific and technological cooperation agreement to promote cooperation in high-tech fields.
"We hope to promote cooperation and research in areas like bio-technology, nanotechnology and life science. Israel will send a delegation to sign a working plan on how to carry out the cooperation pact," National Science Council official Lin Kuang-lung (
The delegation, led by Acting Minister of Science and Technology Mina Teicher, was scheduled to arrive this month, but delayed the trip until April because Israel is scheduled to hold elections next month and has asked its ministers to stay home.
"Once the details have been worked out, we hope scientists from both sides can hold seminars so that they can decide how to carry out the exchanges," Lin added.
Israel is satisfied with its trade ties with Taiwan, but is wary of violating its "one China" policy and hurting its diplomatic ties with China, launched in 1992.
"The `one China' policy is a given policy, so we must respect it, but we can develop economic and trade ties because our economies complement each other," Ruth Kahanoff, Israel's trade representative to Taiwan, said in an interview.
Kahanoff said that promoting trade with Taiwan is a high priority for Israel because Taiwan is Israel's third-largest trading partner in Asia after China and Japan in terms of trade without diamonds.
Israeli exports to Taiwan last year totaled US$558 million, compared with US$615 million to China and US$600 million to India.
Israel counts its exports in two ways: with diamonds and without diamonds.
Trade-without-diamond figures are more accurate because diamond exports have little added-value as Israel imports diamonds and earns little from exporting cut diamonds.
Hovav Ref, economic affairs director of the Israel Economic and Cultural Office (ISECO) in Taipei, said that Taiwan and Israel complement each other because Israel is a leader in high-tech and research and development (R&D) while Taiwan has manufacturing capabilities.
"Israel spends 4.6 percent of its GDP on R&D, the highest in the world. Taiwan is good at manufacturing but many Taiwan companies have moved to China, so Taiwan is focusing on high-tech like biotech, semiconductors, etc," Ref said.
But to Taiwan, which is recognized by only 25 mostly small nations and is eager to break out of its international isolation, high-technology imports are not the only thing it wants from Israel.
Press reports said Taiwan wants to launch military ties with Israel and upgrade the level of its general ties with the Middle East country.
According to the reports, Taiwan bought 15 missile-equipped speedboats -- and was seeking to buy 40 Kfir warplanes -- from Israel in the 1980s and 1990s.
Taiwan's Tien Kung (sky bow) surface-to-air missile was modeled on Israel's Gabriel missile, the reports said.
"Israel is good at converting warplanes, electronics warfare, early-warning systems and UAV [unmanned aerial vehicles]. But no-one knows if we have military contacts with Israel," said Tang Feng, director of the Economic Ministry's Industrial Cooperation Program Office.
But China is watching closely, fearing that Israel's export of weapons or defense technology could embolden Taiwan to seek formal independence.
In 1995, former president Lee Teng-hui (
Former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu (in office from 1996-1999) planned to visit Taiwan in 2001 to promote trade ties, but canceled the visit without giving a reason.
In the book, The Taiwan Issue in China's Foreign Relations (published in 2002), Chinese foreign affairs expert Tong Fei summarized Beijing's worries over Taiwan's diplomatic offensive in the Middle East.
Tong Fei said that Taiwan's expanding ties with Middle Eastern nations was to secure its oil supply, and sea and air passages to Central Asia and Europe, as well as to open trade ties and to upgrade these ties to official or semi-official levels.
But China has instructed its diplomatic allies to embrace the "one China" policy and bars them from launching official ties with Taiwan or allowing visits by Taiwan's leaders.
Taiwan has arranged for about 8 million barrels of crude oil, or about one-third of its monthly needs, to be shipped from the Red Sea this month to bypass the Strait of Hormuz and ease domestic supply pressures, CPC Corp, Taiwan (CPC, 台灣中油) said yesterday. The state-run oil company has worked with Middle Eastern suppliers to secure routes other than the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas typically passes, CPC chairman Fang Jeng-zen (方振仁) said at a meeting of the legislature’s Economics Committee in Taipei. Suppliers in Saudi Arabia have indicated they
A global survey showed that 60 percent of Taiwanese had attained higher education, second only to Canada, the Ministry of the Interior said. Taiwan easily surpassed the global average of 43 percent and ranked ahead of major economies, including Japan, South Korea and the US, data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for 2024 showed. Taiwan has a high literacy rate, data released by the ministry showed. As of the end of last year, Taiwan had 20.617 million people aged 15 or older, accounting for 88.5 percent of the total population, with a literacy rate of 99.4 percent, the data
CCP ‘PAWN’? Beijing could use the KMT chairwoman’s visit to signal to the world that many people in Taiwan support the ‘one China’ principle, an academic said Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday arrived in China for a “peace” mission and potential meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), while a Taiwanese minister detailed the number of Chinese warships currently deployed around the nation. Cheng is visiting at a time of increased Chinese military pressure on Taiwan, as the opposition-dominated Legislative Yuan stalls a government plan for US$40 billion in extra defense spending. Speaking to reporters before going to the airport, Cheng said she was going on a “historic journey for peace,” but added that some people felt uneasy about her trip. “If you truly love Taiwan,
NEW LOW: The council in 2024 based predictions on a pessimistic estimate for the nation’s total fertility rate of 0.84, but last year that rate was 0.69, 17 percent lower An expected National Development Council (NDC) report expects the nation’s population to drop below 12 million by 2065, with the old-age dependency ratio to top 100 percent sooner than 2070, sources said yesterday. The council is slated to release its latest population projections in August, using an ultra-low fertility model, the sources said. The previous report projected that Taiwan’s population would fall to 14.37 million by 2070, but based on a new estimate of the total fertility rate (TFR) — the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime — the population is expected to reach 12 million by
RSS