The governments “new southbound policy” should be based on city-level exchanges if Taiwan is to find a way out of its diplomatic plight, Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) said in New Delhi yesterday before concluding his weeklong trip to Malaysia, Thailand and India.
Ko, who is to return to Taiwan today, talked about what he learned from the trip during a visit to the India Gate in New Delhi yesterday.
Due to Chinese pressure, central government officials in the nations he had visited had been reluctant to meet him publicly, Ko said.
Photo: CNA
Taipei’s signing of a memorandum of understanding to promote exchanges on transportation, “smart” city developments and information and communication technology with Malaysia’s Selangor state upset Kuala Lumpur, he said.
Ko said that the challenges facing the nation were strongly felt when visiting other nations.
“Once you go outside, you realize that Taiwanese diplomacy is nearly suffocating,” he said.
In this situation, having robust industries is essential to promoting international exchanges, he added, citing Taiwan’s world-leading information and communication technology sector as the reason Taipei was able to establish ties with Selangor, despite central government disapproval.
Ko said that during his visit to the Indian Institutes of Technology, he reached a sister school agreement with it and the University of Taipei.
Taiwan makes the world’s best computers and consumer electronics hardware, while India produces the world’s most advanced software, Ko said, adding that he hoped the opportunity for collaboration would attract top Indian talent to Taiwan.
Ko said Taiwanese businesspeople play a crucial role in diplomacy, and that he had been able to meet with some important officials because of well-connected Taiwanese business leaders in Malaysia, Thailand and India.
Ko said he was now planning to contact his “friends in China,” to convey his belief that Beijing limiting Taiwan’s international space would not help resolve issues between China and Taiwan, because Taiwan is a mature democracy that values freedom.
He said he would organize his thoughts before proposing a comprehensive argument to China.
Asked whether Beijing had tried to obstruct his delegation, Ko said: “Not repeatedly, but all times.”
The mayor also underlined the role played by the tourism industry in promoting international exchanges.
Comparing Taiwan with Hong Kong, he said that while the nation has “better food, better scenery and better attractions” than Hong Kong, the territory’s tourism sector far outperforms that of Taiwan.
Even excluding Chinese tourists, the yearly number of tourists to Hong Kong is more than 10 million, far exceeding Chinese visitor numbers to Taiwan, and this shows that the government needs to enhance policies to promote “soft power,” he said.
Ko said that he would deliver his policy ideas in a report to the Presidential Office’s New Southbound Policy Office.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS