An inter-ministerial meeting will be held to discuss when to stop scholarship payments to Sao Tomean students studying in Taiwan, including the children of the African nation’s president, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) said yesterday.
Speaking at a routine news conference at the ministry yesterday morning, International Cooperation and Development Fund Deputy Secretary-General Lee Pai-po (李柏浡) said there are 68 Sao Tomean students in Taiwan who are receiving scholarship payments from the foreign ministry, the Ministry of Education or the fund.
They include the daughter and son of Sao Tome and Principe President Evaristo Carvalho.
Carvalho’s daughter is a graduate student at National Yang Ming University, while his son is reportedly a doctoral student of information technology at National Chengchi University.
However, the university on Wednesday said that Carvalho’s son suspended his studies last year.
“We will discuss the situation of 68 [Sao Tomean] students and lay out some principles. We might [keep providing scholarship] until they finish a semester or a year of studies,” Lee said.
Lee added that despite the pending termination of scholarship payments, Sao Tomean students would still be permitted to finish their studies if they pay their own tuition.
He made the remarks one day after Sao Tome and Principe, a nation with a population of about 200,000, announced that it is cutting 19-year-old diplomatic ties with Taiwan, reducing the number of Taipei’s diplomatic allies to 21.
Minister of Foreign Affairs David Lee (李大維) on Wednesday said that Taipei’s denial of the African nation’s request for an “astronomical amount of financial aid” prompted the decision, while political parties attributed the incident to China and the government’s cross-strait policy.
Lee said the fund has a team of experts and a special project in Sao Tome and Principe that involve four professionals, two family members and five substitute military personnel, who would be withdrawn in two stages.
As for Taiwan’s property and assets in the African nation, Lee said they worth approximately NT$1.7 million (US$53,075) and the government is inclined to donate them to local organizations it has cooperated with.
With regard to the removal of Taiwan’s embassy in Sao Tome, foreign ministry spokeswoman Eleanor Wang (王珮玲) said there are four officials at the embassy, adding that there is no timetable for the removal process, but it would be completed as soon as possible.
The military has spotted two Chinese warships operating in waters near Penghu County in the Taiwan Strait and sent its own naval and air forces to monitor the vessels, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) said. Beijing sends warships and warplanes into the waters and skies around Taiwan on an almost daily basis, drawing condemnation from Taipei. While the ministry offers daily updates on the locations of Chinese military aircraft, it only rarely gives details of where Chinese warships are operating, generally only when it detects aircraft carriers, as happened last week. A Chinese destroyer and a frigate entered waters to the southwest
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Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s comment last year on Tokyo’s potential reaction to a Taiwan-China conflict has forced Beijing to rewrite its invasion plans, a retired Japanese general said. Takaichi told the Diet on Nov. 7 last year that a Chinese naval blockade or military attack on Taiwan could constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan, potentially allowing Tokyo to exercise its right to collective self-defense. Former Japan Ground Self-Defense Force general Kiyofumi Ogawa said in a recent speech that the remark has been interpreted as meaning Japan could intervene in the early stages of a Taiwan Strait conflict, undermining China’s previous assumptions
Instead of focusing solely on the threat of a full-scale military invasion, the US and its allies must prepare for a potential Chinese “quarantine” of Taiwan enforced through customs inspections, Stanford University Hoover fellow Eyck Freymann said in a Foreign Affairs article published on Wednesday. China could use various “gray zone” tactics in “reconfiguring the regional and ultimately the global economic order without a war,” said Freymann, who is also a nonresident research fellow at the US Naval War College. China might seize control of Taiwan’s links to the outside world by requiring all flights and ships entering or leaving Taiwan
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