Taiwan cherishes its diplomatic ties with Tuvalu and is willing to continue to enhance relations with the Pacific ally, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement yesterday.
The reaffirmation of the Taipei-Funafuti alliance came amid an envoy’s warning that the island nation could soon follow Nauru’s decision earlier this month to ditch Taipei for Beijing.
In a news article published on Friday last week by the Weekend Australian, Tuvaluan Ambassador to Taiwan Bikenibeu Paeniu said “sources from Tuvalu” had told him that his country could follow Nauru and switch its diplomatic recognition to Beijing after its election on Friday.
Photo: Screen grab from the Presidential Office’s Web site
The former Tuvaluan prime minister called on Australia and its allies and partners to closely watch the situation and to step up their support for his nation.
The ministry reaffirmed Taiwan’s strong bilateral cooperation with Tuvalu in various areas, including agriculture and fisheries, medicine and healthcare, information and communications, clean energy, and education and cultural exchanges, since the two countries established diplomatic links in 1979.
The ministry said that after Vice President William Lai (賴清德) of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party was elected president on Jan. 13, Tuvaluan senior officials and politicians across party lines issued congratulatory messages to Lai, while offering reassurances that Tuvalu-Taiwan ties would remain strong.
The list included Governor-General Tofiga Falani, Prime Minister Kausea Natano, and Speaker of Parliament Samuelu Penitala Teo, the ministry added.
Taipei would continue to cherish the countries’ solid friendship and seek to bolster bilateral cooperation on various fronts based on the shared values of freedom, democracy, human rights and rule of law, the ministry said.
Nauru announced on Monday last week that it was severing ties with Taiwan to recognize the People’s Republic of China.
That left Taiwan with 12 UN-recognized allies, including the Marshall Islands, Tuvalu and Palau in the Pacific region.
In a report by The Australian, Paeniu also said that Beijing had been highly active in Tuvalu since the latter’s last election in late 2019.
Several Chinese companies had offered to help the Pacific island nation — which is facing a risk of being submerged in the coming decades as sea levels rise — with a US$400 million artificial island establishment project, the envoy said.
The Chinese offer was rebuffed, but sources in Taipei told the Weekend Australian that a similar proposal has been made again in the lead-up to the election on Friday.
Following Nauru’s decision last week, the Marshall Islands, Tuvalu and Palau all pledged to stick with Taiwan, the ministry said.
The severing of ties between Taiwan and Nauru came two days after Lai was elected president. The ministry had accused China of plotting to poach Taiwan’s diplomatic ally as part of a calculated “assault on democracy.”
Nauru was the 10th diplomatic ally Taipei has lost to Beijing since President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) took office in May 2016.
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
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
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
MANAGING DIFFERENCES: In a meeting days after the US president signed a massive foreign aid bill, Antony Blinken raised concerns with the Chinese president about Taiwan US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday met with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and senior Chinese officials, stressing the importance of “responsibly managing” the differences between the US and China as the two sides butt heads over a number of contentious bilateral, regional and global issues, including Taiwan and the South China Sea. Talks between the two sides have increased over the past few months, even as differences have grown. Blinken said he raised concerns with Xi about Taiwan and the South China Sea, along with China’s support for Russia and its invasion of Ukraine, as well as other issues