Minister of Foreign Affairs Joseph Wu (吳釗燮) yesterday said that no member of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) has expressed opposition to Taiwan applying to join the trade bloc.
“So far, we have not met any one country [that is a CPTPP member] that has openly or privately expressed their objection to Taiwan’s bid,” Wu told lawmakers at a meeting of the legislature’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee.
The government had been in talks with all 11 CPTPP members about Taiwan’s possible membership, Wu said.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Asked on Friday if Australia supported Taiwan joining the bloc, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said that the CPTPP was “a relationship between nation states that are recognized.”
Speaking at the APEC summit in Bangkok, Albanese described Taiwan as an “economy,” inferred by some to mean that Taiwan did not qualify to join the CPTPP.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that this interpretation is at odds with the CPTPP’s charter, which states that “any State or separate customs territory may accede to this Agreement.”
On Saturday, Albanese offered a slightly modified response, stating that applications would be “dealt with on consensus for economies applying to join the CPTPP” and judged based on their individual merits.
At yesterday’s legislative meeting, Wu said the Australian government had made it clear to Taipei that it welcomed “all economic entities” that meet the CPTPP’s high standards to join the bloc.
Wu said that following Albanese comments on Friday, the ministry had reached out to an “authoritative Australian government branch,” which made the clarification.
The ministry did not reveal the source of the clarification, and the Australian government has not issued a statement to that effect.
The CPTPP — which grew out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership abandoned by the US in January 2017 — is one of the world’s biggest trade blocs, representing a market of 500 million people and accounting for 13.5 percent of global trade.
For a new member to join the CPTPP, all 11 signatories — Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam — must approve the application.
Taiwan applied on Sept. 22 last year to join the CPTPP, less than one week after China submitted its application.
Asked when Taiwan might join the trade bloc, Wu told lawmakers that the CPTPP is focusing on reviewing the UK’s bid and is unlikely to deal with Taiwan’s application any time soon.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS