Taiwan must learn from Ukraine and formulate a comprehensive and self-sufficient national security framework to defend against Chinese aggression, a British historian told a forum in Taipei on Saturday.
Ensuring a country’s own defense was “the biggest lesson we can learn” from the ongoing conflict between Ukraine and Russia, Wang Hao (汪浩) said at the forum hosted by the pro-independence Taiwan New Constitution Foundation (TNCF).
It is essential for the government to take action to strengthen military training, civilian-based defense, conscription, power grid resilience and information warfare, Wang said.
Photo: CNA
Given that international support has proven to be a boon for Ukraine, Taiwan should also “internationalize” the question of its own sovereignty to counter Beijing’s framing of the issue as a domestic dispute, he said.
The conflict in Ukraine is the “last chapter” of the Cold War between the US and the former Soviet Union, he said, adding that a “new cold war” between Washington and Beijing is likely to dominate global politics in the years to come.
US support for Ukraine and sanctions against Moscow would ultimately lead to Russia’s political, military and economic “defeat,” allowing the US to turn its attention to Asia, Wang said.
Just as Russia is being isolated from the international community, Washington and its allies would seek to exclude China — the US’ largest trading partner and the world’s second-largest economy — from global economics, trade, finance and technology, Wang said.
TNCF deputy CEO Raymond Sung (宋承恩) told the forum that Taiwan’s top focus should be strengthening its expressions of sovereignty to compensate for its lack of formal international recognition.
Meanwhile, Taipei Medical University professor Chang Kuo-cheng (張國城) said that Taiwan’s most urgent task was to reckon with its authoritarian past through a process of transitional justice.
“Imagine if in Ukraine at this moment there were still people memorializing Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, or traveling to Russia to hear speeches by [Russian] President Vladimir Putin,” he said, in a seeming allusion to Taiwan’s past leaders.
The TNCF, founded by independence advocate Koo Kwang-ming (辜寬敏), supports drafting a new constitution and pushes for Taiwan’s normalization as a sovereign country.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,