US President Joe Biden’s engagements with regional leaders during his trip to Asia could yield positive political overtones for Taiwan, observers in the US said on Thursday.
There could be serious conversations on what Japan and the US might do to “deter aggression against Taiwan,” said Shelia Smith, a senior fellow for Asia-Pacific studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based think tank.
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who has framed the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a challenge to global order that affects the Indo-Pacific region, would certainly want to continue to coordinate with the US on how to respond to a potential Taiwan crisis, Smith told a forum to preview Biden’s trip, which began in South Korea on Friday.
Photo: AFP
References to peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait, and concerns over China’s behavior can be expected in a joint statement issued by Biden and Kishida, Smith said.
Biden met with South Korean President Yoon Seok-youl, with the focus of their talks expected to be on North Korea.
Biden is to travel to Tokyo to meet Kishida and attend a summit on Tuesday of Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) leaders, an alliance of the US, Japan, India and Australia.
The emphasis is likely to be on China at the Quad meeting, observers said.
Manjari Chatterjee Miller, a senior fellow for India, Pakistan and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, told the forum that she expects the top agenda item at the Quad summit to be the specter of China as a strategic threat to open societies and democracies.
“It would also be a demonstration that there would be the similar kind of resolve in Asia on Taiwan as there has been in Europe on Ukraine,” Miller said. “I think that’s something that the Biden administration would hope to solidify with this meeting.”
However, Miller said she does not expect a Quad statement that explicitly mentions China, partly because India would not be part of the Quad if it were an explicitly anti-China alliance.
Nonetheless, the way Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, characterized the trip — that it is meant for open societies and democracies to get together — has made it clear there would be regional support for Taiwan were China to invade, she said.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods