DIPLOMACY
Chinese delegation visits
China’s Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits Deputy Chairman Zheng Lizhong (鄭立中) began a trip to the nation’s center and south yesterday to study the agricultural and aquaculture sectors. Invited by the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) think tank the National Policy Foundation, Zheng arrived at Kaohsiung International Airport. The itinerary for Zheng and a delegation of five to eight members will be similar to when he visited last year, officials from the Taipei-based Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF), said, when Zheng traveled to Greater Taichung, Greater Kaohsiung and Greater Tainan and Changhua, Yunlin, Chiayi and Pingtung counties.
CULTURE
Documentary wins US award
A documentary produced by the Public Television Service (PTS) has received a prestigious award in the US, it was learned yesterday. A Year in the Clouds was one of 15 works honored in the “People & Places” section in the Professional Non-fiction Division of the Fall CINE Golden Eagle Awards. The documentary depicts a year in the life of a group of Atayal Aborigines who live in the high mountain village of Smangus. Two decades ago, the tribe was among the poorest in the nation, but its chief, Icyeh Sulung, had a vision of great trees that would ensure the tribe’s survival. The tribe found a forest of Cypress trees that changed their lives. Interest from tourists turned Smangus into a thriving ecotourism center, but sudden wealth and outside pressures played havoc with the tribe’s unity. This was the fourth time that PTS has won the prestigious award. The three previous works honored were Mme. Chiang Kai-shek (2005), The Secret in the Satchel (2008) and Taipei 24h (2010).
SOCIETY
Agency touts English sites
The Research, Development and Evaluation Commission on Friday launched a Facebook page to publicize government English-language Web sites and seek feedback. The commission said that after years of providing bilingual Web pages, the agency was seeking to make the service better known. It encouraged people to visit the government Web sites listed on its Facebook page and leave their comments. Those who do will be eligible for a lucky draw, with prizes ranging from brand name watches and an iPad2 to round-trip tickets to Los Angeles. The event will run through March 31. More information is available at www.i-taiwan.nat.gov.tw.
ARCHEOLOGY
NTU team finds rare jade
A team of National Taiwan University (NTU) students has unearthed a rare jade core at the Puyuma Archaeological Site in eastern Taiwan, according to officials from the Taitung-based National Museum of Prehistory. Wang Ying (王潁), an anthropology student at NTU and a member of the team, and 26 other students had been participating in an archeology field study at the site in Taitung County organized by NTU and the museum, the officials said, adding the students also discovered a number of more common jade tubes. About 6,000 items of jadeware have been unearthed from the site over the years — however, jade cores are considered to be very rare, the museum’s assistant researcher Lee Kun-hsiu (李坤修) said. Used in jadeware production, a jade core is usually discarded after an item has been made, Lee said. However, no jadeware factories have been discovered in the area, and the archeological site is 100km away from the source of the jade, the researcher said.
GREAT POWER COMPETITION: Beijing views its military cooperation with Russia as a means to push back against the joint power of the US and its allies, an expert said A recent Sino-Russian joint air patrol conducted over the waters off Alaska was designed to counter the US military in the Pacific and demonstrated improved interoperability between Beijing’s and Moscow’s forces, a national security expert said. National Defense University associate professor Chen Yu-chen (陳育正) made the comment in an article published on Wednesday on the Web site of the Journal of the Chinese Communist Studies Institute. China and Russia sent four strategic bombers to patrol the waters of the northern Pacific and Bering Strait near Alaska in late June, one month after the two nations sent a combined flotilla of four warships
‘LEADERS’: The report highlighted C.C. Wei’s management at TSMC, Lisa Su’s decisionmaking at AMD and the ‘rock star’ status of Nvidia’s Huang Time magazine on Thursday announced its list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence (AI), which included Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) chairman and chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家), Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) and AMD chair and CEO Lisa Su (蘇姿丰). The list is divided into four categories: Leaders, Innovators, Shapers and Thinkers. Wei and Huang were named in the Leaders category. Other notable figures in the Leaders category included Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Meta CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Su was listed in the Innovators category. Time highlighted Wei’s
EVERYONE’S ISSUE: Kim said that during a visit to Taiwan, she asked what would happen if China attacked, and was told that the global economy would shut down Taiwan is critical to the global economy, and its defense is a “here and now” issue, US Representative Young Kim said during a roundtable talk on Taiwan-US relations on Friday. Kim, who serves on the US House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee, held a roundtable talk titled “Global Ties, Local Impact: Why Taiwan Matters for California,” at Santiago Canyon College in Orange County, California. “Despite its small size and long distance from us, Taiwan’s cultural and economic importance is felt across our communities,” Kim said during her opening remarks. Stanford University researcher and lecturer Lanhee Chen (陳仁宜), lawyer Lin Ching-chi
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) was wooing leaders from across Africa with a banquet on Wednesday night, King Mswati III of Eswatini was notably absent. That is because the kingdom — about the size of New Jersey and with just 1.2 million people — is one of Taiwan’s remaining dozen diplomatic allies. That means Eswatini does not participate in Xi’s Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, the centerpiece of China’s diplomatic outreach to Africa, which was held in Beijing this week. The landlocked nation, which sits between Mozambique and South Africa, is the last holdout in Beijing’s seven-plus decade mission to make Africa
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