Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs Antonio Tajani on Tuesday said that his nation is aligned with the EU and NATO in opposing changes to the “status quo” in the Taiwan Strait, after China announced a diplomatic trip to Rome.
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Monday said that Wang Yi (王毅), director of the Chinese Central Foreign Affairs Commission, would be visiting France, Italy, Hungary and Russia from Tuesday to Wednesday next week.
He is also scheduled to speak at the Munich Security Conference in Germany this weekend, which US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is likely to attend.
Photo: EPA-EFE
It is Wang’s first overseas trip since assuming China’s top diplomatic position on Jan. 1, following a decade as minister of foreign affairs from 2013 to last year.
Speaking at a forum at Libera Universita Internazionale degli Studi Sociali in Rome on Tuesday, Tajani confirmed that Wang would visit Italy next week, Italian news site Le Formiche reported.
Tajani then issued a message to China, saying that “the status quo must be maintained in the Indo-Pacific; we are committed to this with NATO and the EU.”
“Taipei must remain as it is,” the report quoted him as saying, an apparent reference to China’s aim of unification with Taiwan.
“There must be no temptation to do elsewhere what Russia has done in Ukraine,” he added.
The issue was also raised in a meeting in December last year between Tajani and US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, when they declared their “opposition to unilateral efforts to change the status quo in the Taiwan Strait,” a US press release at the time said.
In an interview with Le Formiche on Saturday, Italian Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs Maria Tripodi said that China “is an issue on the global political agenda.”
“China has progressively tightened its grip on Taiwan through exercises in the neighboring air and sea space,” Tripodi said. “Combined with increasing investments in the Pacific area, penetrating into European ports and the Horn of Africa, all of this cannot but generate concern in neighboring countries.”
Wang likely has two goals in visiting Rome next week, Le Formiche reported.
The first is to set the groundwork for a potential visit to Beijing by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who was invited by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Indonesia in November last year, it said.
Wang is also likely to pursue the extension of a Belt and Road Initiative agreement with Italy, which is to expire in March next year, it said.
If no action is taken by either side by the end of this year, the agreement is to renew automatically.
EUROPEAN TARGETS: The planned Munich center would support TSMC’s European customers to design high-performance, energy-efficient chips, an executive said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, yesterday said that it plans to launch a new research-and-development (R&D) center in Munich, Germany, next quarter to assist customers with chip design. TSMC Europe president Paul de Bot made the announcement during a technology symposium in Amsterdam on Tuesday, the chipmaker said. The new Munich center would be the firm’s first chip designing center in Europe, it said. The chipmaker has set up a major R&D center at its base of operations in Hsinchu and plans to create a new one in the US to provide services for major US customers,
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday said that it would redesign the written portion of the driver’s license exam to make it more rigorous. “We hope that the exam can assess drivers’ understanding of traffic rules, particularly those who take the driver’s license test for the first time. In the past, drivers only needed to cram a book of test questions to pass the written exam,” Minister of Transportation and Communications Chen Shih-kai (陳世凱) told a news conference at the Taoyuan Motor Vehicle Office. “In the future, they would not be able to pass the test unless they study traffic regulations
‘A SURVIVAL QUESTION’: US officials have been urging the opposition KMT and TPP not to block defense spending, especially the special defense budget, an official said The US plans to ramp up weapons sales to Taiwan to a level exceeding US President Donald Trump’s first term as part of an effort to deter China as it intensifies military pressure on the nation, two US officials said on condition of anonymity. If US arms sales do accelerate, it could ease worries about the extent of Trump’s commitment to Taiwan. It would also add new friction to the tense US-China relationship. The officials said they expect US approvals for weapons sales to Taiwan over the next four years to surpass those in Trump’s first term, with one of them saying
‘COMING MENACINGLY’: The CDC advised wearing a mask when visiting hospitals or long-term care centers, on public transportation and in crowded indoor venues Hospital visits for COVID-19 last week increased by 113 percent to 41,402, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said yesterday, as it encouraged people to wear a mask in three public settings to prevent infection. CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said weekly hospital visits for COVID-19 have been increasing for seven consecutive weeks, and 102 severe COVID-19 cases and 19 deaths were confirmed last week, both the highest weekly numbers this year. CDC physician Lee Tsung-han (李宗翰) said the youngest person hospitalized due to the disease this year was reported last week, a one-month-old baby, who does not