The global trend is toward “de-risking” relations with China, Premier Chen Chien-jen (陳建仁) said yesterday, in response to calls by opposition parties to restart talks on a proposed cross-strait service trade agreement.
Previous talks on the proposed pact resulted in “several hundred thousand Taiwanese standing up in protest,” Chen said, referring to the Sunflower movement of 2014.
Today, Taiwan hopes to follow the global trend of de-risking with China, and “not putting all of its eggs in one basket,” he said.
Photo: Screenshot from Liberty Times’ YouTube
De-risking is especially important for Taiwan given US-China tensions, and Taiwan’s desire to boost economic cooperation with other countries, Chen said.
Chen made the remarks after Taiwan People’s Party Chairman Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), who is running for president, raised the proposal at a recent event. New Taipei City Mayor Hou You-yi (侯友宜), who is the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) candidate, has also expressed support for the proposal.
The proposed agreement, which China and the then-KMT government signed in 2013, aimed to liberalize trade and investment rules between the two economies in service industries including finance, tourism, healthcare, telecoms and publishing.
However, the KMT’s efforts to hastily ratify the pact in the legislature set off a three-week, student-led sit-in protest in the legislature, which led to the agreement being shelved.
Economic Democracy Union convener Lai Chung-chiang (賴中強) said that if the proposed pact were approved, large numbers of Chinese companies would establish local branches in Taiwan, which would likely hire Chinese employees, and would not help local employment.
The goal of any such trade or service agreement would be the complete integration of Taiwan’s economy with China’s, he said.
Chinese agricultural and industrial products would also be dumped on Taiwan, which would greatly harm Taiwanese farmers and manufacturing firms, he said.
“The result of economic integration would be to bring the economic risks of China closer to Taiwan, while forcing Taiwan to remain on its old path of economic dependence on China,” he said.
Vice President William Lai (賴清德), who is the Democratic Progressive Party’s presidential candidate, on Sunday said that those proposing to restart talks on the service trade pact “do not understand current international trends.”
“Taiwan’s current economic and industrial structure is completely different from what it was when the agreement was first discussed 10 years ago,” he said. “To enter into such an agreement today would be very detrimental to Taiwan.”
Asked about the pact, Hou on Sunday said that “both sides of the Taiwan Strait should resume pragmatic exchanges and dialogue on cooperation in education, culture, and in trade and the economy, including through the cross-strait service trade agreement.”
During a radio interview yesterday, Ko said that talks on the agreement should be preceded by supervisory regulations, and that “the trade in goods must precede the trade in services,” because the former would present “fewer problems involving people, and is therefore easier to deal with.”
Additional reporting by Tang Shih-ming, Huang Tzu-yang and CNA
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest foundry service provider, yesterday said that global semiconductor revenue is projected to hit US$1.5 trillion in 2030, after the figure exceeds US$1 trillion this year, as artificial intelligence (AI) demand boosts consumption of token and compute power. “We are still at the beginning of the AI revolution, but we already see a significant impact across the whole semiconductor ecosystem,” TSMC deputy cochief operating officer Kevin Zhang (張曉強) said at the company’s annual technology symposium in Hsinchu City. “It is fair to say that in the past decade, smartphones and other mobile devices were
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS