Taiwan’s national defense report was released yesterday in Chinese and English simultaneously for the first time to boost communications between foreign countries and Taiwan amid efforts to combat the rising military threat from China.
The Ministry of National Defense began issuing the report on the latest military-related developments in Taiwan in Chinese and English in 1992.
However, over the past 30 years, the Chinese edition was published first, followed by the English version weeks or months later.
Photo: CNA
A military source told reporters that it previously took at least one-and-a-half months for the Chinese version to be translated and put online.
By publishing them together, international media can cite it as soon as it is published to make it more timely and newsworthy, the source said.
Ministry spokesman Shih Shun-wen (史順文) said that the change would also enable Taiwan’s armed forces to better communicate with foreign countries and support the government’s policy to make Taiwan a bilingual nation.
The 16th edition, tilted Resilience: ROC Armed Forces, reported on efforts over the past two years to reform the military branches and bolster their ability to deter intensifying military coercion from China.
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has attempted to “unilaterally alter the international order of freedom and openness through the manipulation by gray zone activities” as the world is busy dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, it said.
“The PRC’s military preparations, realistic combat training and exercises, and intimidations and actions targeted at Taiwan are expected to be intensified, posing a grave threat to the security in the Taiwan Strait,” it said.
Beijing’s so-called gray zone warfare includes near-daily incursions of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) planes into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone and military drills in the vicinity of the Pratas Islands (Dongsha Islands, 東沙群島), it said.
China is also deploying other non-traditional threats against Taipei, including cyber and cognitive warfare, which the report said is aimed at conquering Taiwan without a full-scale military conflict, it said.
In response, Taiwan’s military branches improved combat preparedness with the acquisition of new weapon systems from abroad and by developing indigenous solutions, it said.
The domestic efforts include the rollout of the Advanced Jet Trainer program, the delivery of more ships under the High-Performance Vessel program and starting the building phase of the Indigenous Defensive Submarine program, the report said.
The ministry also published online an infographic and a summary of the report to make it more accessible to the public.
A comic version of the report was issued to draw greater attention to national defense issues, the ministry said.
The full English version is online at: https://reurl.cc/OkDgj3.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater