Paraguayan president-elect Mario Abdo Benitez has extended a formal invitation to President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) to attend his inauguration on Aug. 15, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said yesterday.
Department of Latin American and Caribbean Affairs Deputy Director-General Vivia Chang (張俊菲) said Paraguayan Ambassador to Taiwan Marcial Bobadilla Guillen was due to deliver the invitation personally to the ministry yesterday afternoon.
“We will then forward the invitation to the Presidential Office through our channel, but we will leave it to the office to announce whether Tsai will attend the ceremony,” Chang told a routine news conference.
Asked whether Tsai has made a decision on the matter, Presidential Office spokesman Alex Huang (黃重諺) yesterday said the office would make an announcement if and when there is such a plan.
Paraguay — one of Taiwan’s 18 diplomatic allies — has benefited from more than US$30 million in housing project grants and a debt payment deferral of US$400 million in 2009 from Taipei in its 61-year friendship.
Taiwan has lost four diplomatic allies to China since Tsai assumed the presidency in May 2016, including the Dominican Republic, whose switch came after Beijing pledged US$820 million in public investments.
Minister of Foreign Affairs Joseph Wu (吳釗燮) has dismissed concerns that Taiwan is engaging in a diplomatic bidding war with China, assuring the public that any assistance to allies is based on humanitarian aid programs rather than hard cash.
In other developments, Chang said all 260 Taiwanese have been reported safe after the latest round of protests in Nicaragua, one of Taiwan’s diplomatic allies.
A nationwide protest was held from Thursday to Saturday after Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega rejected calls for early elections to solve the country’s months-long political crisis, which has resulted in the death of more than 250 people amid a heavy-handed crackdown on protests.
Many of the factories operated by Taiwanese in Nicaragua shut down during the protests out of safety concerns, Chang added.
Additional reporting by CNA
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
RSS