Nearly 700 heads of states, diplomats and foreign dignitaries from 59 countries around the world are to attend president-elect Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) inauguration today, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said yesterday.
At a routine news conference yesterday morning, ministry spokeswoman Eleanor Wang (王珮玲) said the 59 include Taiwan’s 22 diplomatic allies and 37 that do not have formal ties with Taipei.
“From my understanding, the number of foreign dignitaries attending Tsai’s inauguration ceremony surpasses those in previous years,” Wang said.
Photo: CNA
She said the invitation process this year went “very smoothly.”
The ministry said the US delegation is to be led by former US trade representative Ron Kirk, who is to be accompanied by former US deputy secretary of state John Negroponte, former US Department of State deputy spokesman Alan Romberg, American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) Chairman Raymond Burghardt and AIT Director Kin Moy.
The Holy See — the nation’s only European diplomatic ally — is sticking with precedent and sending its Apostolic Nuncio to Japan, Archbishop Joseph Chennoth.
Photo: CNA
Chennoth and Vatican’s charge d’affaires ad interim to Taiwan, Monsignor Sladan Cosic, are also to attend Tsai’s state banquet tonight at Taipei’s Marriott Hotel.
Eighteen delegations from other European nations, including the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Denmark, Ireland, Slovakia and Hungary, have arrived for a total of 48 people.
One delegation, led by European Parliament-Taiwan Friendship Group vice chairman Dominique Riquet, includes former Dutch prime minister Andreas van Agt, former Slovakian prime minister Iveta Radicova and All-Party Parliamentary British-Taiwanese Group co-chairman Lord Faulkner of Worcester.
As for Japan, a delegation of 252 people arrived in Taipei on Wednesday, including Interchange Association, Japan President Tadashi Imai, as well as chief executive and vice chairman of the Japan-Republic of China (ROC) Diet Members’ Consultative Council, Furuya Keiji and Eto Seishiro.
The leaders of Taiwan’s six Asia-Pacific allies are attending: Marshallese President Hilda Heine, Nauruan President Baron Waqa, Tuvaluan Prime Minister Enele Sosene Sopoaga, Palauan President Tommy Remengesau, Solomon Islands Governor General Frank Ofagioro Kabui and Kiribati President Taneti Maamau.
Other Asian-Pacific states, including South Korea, Australia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore and India, have all sent delegates to the event.
Leaders and high-level officials of the nation’s diplomatic allies in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean will also attend the ceremony, including Swazi King Mswati III, Burkinabe Prime Minister Paul Kaba Thieba, Sao Tomean Minister of Foreign Affairs Manuel Salvador dos Ramos, Paraguayan President Horacio Cartes, Saint Kitts and Nevis Prime Minister Timothy Harris, Nicaraguan Vice President Moises Omar Halleslevens Acevedo, as well as the deputy prime ministers of Belize and Saint Vincent, and the legislative speaker of Saint Lucian.
Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez is not able to attend Tsai’s inauguration ceremony as planned due to “internal affairs.”
Instead, he has sent Honduran Supreme Court President Rolando Edgardo Argueta Perez, said Miguel Tsao (曹立傑), director-general of the ministry’s Department of Latin American and Caribbean Affairs.
NO-LIMITS PARTNERSHIP: ‘The bottom line’ is that if the US were to have a conflict with China or Russia it would likely open up a second front with the other, a US senator said Beijing and Moscow could cooperate in a conflict over Taiwan, the top US intelligence chief told the US Senate this week. “We see China and Russia, for the first time, exercising together in relation to Taiwan and recognizing that this is a place where China definitely wants Russia to be working with them, and we see no reason why they wouldn’t,” US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told a US Senate Committee on Armed Services hearing on Thursday. US Senator Mike Rounds asked Haines about such a potential scenario. He also asked US Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has