Orders worth about US$2 billion for high-tech products and farm produce. Offers of tax incentives for investment. A promise to send 120,000 tourists to Taiwan every year.
Those were some of the deals signed off by a 2,000-strong delegation from China’s Fujian Province during a recent weeklong visit to Taiwan.
It was one of the many buy-Taiwan delegations China has sent over the past year. The visits underscore China’s newly acquired wealth and its immense buying power. They come amid President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) efforts to promote trade and end decades of cross-strait hostility.
The Fujian delegation, led by the governor and three deputy governors, was by far the largest and attracted constant media coverage, with television cameras following Fujian chief Huang Xiaojing (黃小晶) as he chatted with people on the street, visited high-tech factories and sampled Taiwan’s famed yellow mangoes.
While it is still uncertain whether all of the product orders will be honored — previous Chinese buying trips to Taiwan have not always lived up to their promises — the mission from Fujian underscores China’s interest in leveraging its buying power to achieve political ends.
Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) believes that closer economic ties are the best way to move toward that target, and provincial buying trips — combined with a groundbreaking trade pact expected to be signed next month — are viewed as key elements in his strategy.
Huang attended a ceremony in Kaohsiung City for the inaugural cruise by China’s Cosco Star from the Fujian city of Xiamen that carried 300 Chinese passengers, many with the kind of bulging wallets that light up the eyes of Taiwanese merchants and tour operators.
Huang also offered tax incentives for Taiwanese investing in his province’s Haixi Economic Zone, which is modeled after Taiwan’s world-famous high-tech parks.
Working together, he said, the two sides could design and manufacture products that could make an impact all over the world.
During its visit to Taiwan, the Fujian group may have been thinking about unification, but they were careful not to talk too much about it.
“The buy-Taiwan group no doubt had a political purpose, but the Chinese have learned to push their political agenda in a more subtle way,” Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Huang Wei-cher (黃偉哲) said.
That may explain why the delegation’s visits to Yunlin and Tainan — the stronghold of the pro-independence DPP — did not produce the kind of violent demonstrations that have marred earlier visits by senior Chinese envoys.
One of its highlights was a gala banquet attended by 106 Fujian town chiefs and other officials as well as their counterparts in Nantou County. With 40 chefs from Fujian doing the cooking, the banquet for 700 people was described by local media as the largest grass-roots exchange ever conducted between Taiwan and China.
On Sunday, a group of Chinese officials and tour operators visited Taipei’s Lin Family Garden and admired its Fujian-style pavilions and houses built in the 1840s by a Taiwanese millionaire, who was among the many immigrating to Taiwan from the Chinese province.
“This is one clear piece of evidence that we have the same roots and should get along well,” said Bao Guozhong, a tour operator from the Fujian capital of Fuzhou.
Kenting National Park service technician Yang Jien-fon (楊政峰) won a silver award in World Grand Prix Photography Awards Spring Season for his photograph of two male rat snakes intertwined in combat. Yang’s colleagues at Kenting National Park said he is a master of nature photography who has been held back by his job in civil service. The awards accept entries in all four seasons across six categories: architectural and urban photography, black-and-white and fine art photography, commercial and fashion photography, documentary and people photography, nature and experimental photography, and mobile photography. Awards are ranked according to scores and divided into platinum, gold and
More than half of the bamboo vipers captured in Tainan in the past few years were found in the city’s Sinhua District (新化), while other districts had smaller catches or none at all. Every year, Tainan captures about 6,000 snakes which have made their way into people’s homes. Of the six major venomous snakes in Taiwan, the cobra, the many-banded krait, the brown-spotted pit viper and the bamboo viper are the most frequently captured. The high concentration of bamboo vipers captured in Sinhua District is puzzling. Tainan Agriculture Bureau Forestry and Nature Conservation Division head Chu Chien-ming (朱健明) earlier this week said that the
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus yesterday said it opposes the introduction of migrant workers from India until a mechanism is in place to prevent workers from absconding. Minister of Labor Hung Sun-han (洪申翰) on Thursday told the Legislative Yuan that the first group of migrant workers from India could be introduced as early as this year, as part of a government program. The caucus’ opposition to the policy is based on the assessment that “the risk is too high,” KMT caucus secretary-general Lin Pei-hsiang (林沛祥) said. Taiwan has a serious and long-standing problem of migrant workers absconding from their contracts, indicating that
SPACE VETERAN: Kjell N. Lindgren, who helps lead NASA’s human spaceflight missions, has been on two expeditions on the ISS and has spent 311 days in space Taiwan-born US astronaut Kjell N. Lindgren is to visit Taiwan to promote technological partnerships through one of the programs organized by the US for its 250th national anniversary. Lindgren would be in Taiwan from Tuesday to Saturday next week as part of the US Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs’ US Speaker Program, organized to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) said in a statement yesterday. Lindgren plans to engage with key leaders across the nation “to advance cutting-edge technological partnerships and inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers,”
RSS