Guam Governor Lourdes Leon Guerrero plans to visit Taiwan next month to promote a COVID-19 “travel bubble” to reopen the US territory to Taiwanese tourists, news reports in Guam said on Wednesday.
Guerrero told a news conference that Taipei is “very anxious” to receive her, and that the visit would be encouraging for economic diversity and the revitalization of tourism, the Pacific News Center reported.
“And so, the circumstances permitting, yes, I will go to Taiwan,” the report quoted Guerrero as saying.
Traveling to Taiwan is not a concern for her because of its effective COVID-19 control, it quoted her as saying.
“I think they’re the only country really that hasn’t had any COVID-19 surges,” she said. “For a country with a 23 million population, Taiwan has, I think, only about 500 positive cases and only seven deaths.”
The report said that Guerrero wants more tourists and investment from Taiwan, citing Guam Visitors’ Bureau (GVB) President Carl Gutierrez.
The Guam Daily Post also reported that Guerrero is planning a trip to Taiwan.
“The GVB is exploring the possibility of having a travel bubble arrangement with Taiwan,” the Guam Daily Post said. “Bureau officials anticipate that the governor leading a travel delegation to Taiwan will help boost the tourism bubble plan.”
Guerrero in August tested positive for the virus.
Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Joanne Ou (歐江安) said that it would make announcements about a potential Guerrero visit pending additional information.
Taiwan maintains good relations and close contact with Guam, as the ministry in October reopened its Guam office, which was closed in 2017, Ou said.
Regarding a tourism bubble, Ou said that the two sides have already had initial discussions and would continue to coordinate on the matter, as COVID-19 prevention is the priority at the moment.
The ministry would closely monitor the disease situation in Taiwan and Guam, while cooperating with the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC), she said.
As of yesterday, Taiwan had reported 757 cases of COVID-19, of which 665 cases were imported, with seven deaths, CECC data showed.
Guam had reported 7,183 cases with 119 fatalities, according to a Guam government update as of 6pm yesterday.
The Council of Agriculture yesterday signed a Taiwan-Australia Agricultural Cooperation Implementation clause to open a new export market for the nation’s pineapple crop. The clause is an addition to existing cooperation measures, it said. China on Friday last week abruptly announced that it would suspend pineapple imports from Taiwan starting on Monday, on grounds that it had on multiple occasions discovered “harmful organisms” in shipments of the fruit. The public and private sectors have since joined hands to purchase the local fruit to help the nation’s pineapple farmers. Canberra has requested that all pineapples for export to Australia have their crown buds removed,
POSSIBLE SIDE EFFECTS: As China attempted to promote its national image through humanitarian aid, its targets include New Southbound Policy countries, an expert said China’s “vaccine diplomacy,” which has become central to its foreign policy this year, might hamper Taiwan’s efforts to build relations with developing countries, an expert said. “China, as one of the few countries other than the United Kingdom and the United States to have produced a COVID-19 vaccine, will certainly use that as a diplomatic tool,” said Kung Shan-son (龔祥生), an assistant research fellow at the government-funded Institute for National Defense and Security Research. Beijing’s major goals in its “vaccine diplomacy” are to promote its national image through humanitarian aid and to solidify its relations with countries that are included in its
A Tainan taxi driver is the Taiwanese with the longest name, after he last month changed it so that it now contains 25 characters, the Anping District Household Registration Office said. The 47-year-old man, formerly known as Huang Hsin-hsiang (黃鑫翔), applied for the name change on Feb. 26, in the hope that it would bring him good luck. His new name starts with Huang Da-lan (黃大嵐) and adds another 22 characters, meaning “Huang Da-lan is the blessed darling and sweetheart of the god of joy, god of wealth, god of misfortune, god of Earth and all the gods,” it said. With
Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical Group might have lost its right to distribute the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for COVID-19 and the ability to fulfill a contract in Taiwan, civic groups Taiwan Citizen Front and the Economic Democracy Union said yesterday. In a radio interview on Feb. 17, Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), head of the Central Epidemic Command Center, said that last year, Taiwan was close to signing a contract to buy doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, but that the deal was halted at the last moment, with some speculating that Chinese interference was to blame. On Monday last week, the center
RSS