President-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) plan to deepen ties with Southeast Asian countries after taking office might be challenging due to China’s growing influence in the region, the Nikkei Asia said on Saturday.
Lai is poised to build on President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) legacy and continue to foster deeper engagement with Southeast Asia after his inauguration on May 20, the Nikkei Asia reported.
“The new government will continue the good foundation and results of the New Southbound Policy and continue to deepen relations with Southeast Asian and South Asian countries,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Jeff Liu (劉永健) was quoted by the Nikkei Asia as saying.
Photo: CNA
Deepening relations with Southeast Asian and Indo-Pacific countries has been a long-term objective of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he said.
Tsai launched the New Southbound Policy in 2016 to strengthen Taiwan’s relations with 18 nations — Australia, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, New Zealand, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam — through economic and trade collaboration, talent exchanges, resource sharing and regional connectivity, the Executive Yuan said.
None of the 18 nations has formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan.
Taipei last year approved US$5.54 billion of investments under the New Southbound Policy, exceeding that in China for the second consecutive year, the Executive Yuan’s Office of Trade Negotiations said.
Minister of Economic Affairs Wang Mei-hua (王美花) was quoted by the Nikkei Asia as saying that “the trend will only continue because of the push from the US-China trade tensions.”
Chong Ja Ian (莊嘉穎), a political science professor at National University of Singapore and a nonresident scholar at Carnegie China, said that the engagement “remains largely focused on commercial interaction.”
However, Southeast Asian countries’ “reluctance to antagonize China by being seen to be close to Taipei” has proved an obstacle to the nation’s effort to deepen ties with them, the paper said.
The governments as well as societal and commercial actors are “cautious about demonstrating interest in Taiwan,” Chong said.
Taiwan has been striving to bolster people-to-people exchanges with Southeast Asian nations by relaxing visa rules and offering more university scholarships, the paper said.
Whether to continue attracting students or recruiting talent to work in Taiwan from these countries would be challenging for the new president as “Chinese influence is on the rise in Southeast Asia,” it said.
Polling conducted by the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute as part of its State of Southeast Asia 2024 Survey showed that more than half of respondents, 50.5 percent, from Southeast Asian nations favored China over the US.
The survey also found a growing sense of optimism among Southeast Asian respondents regarding their nation’s future relations with China, with 51.4 percent anticipating improvement, up from 38.7 percent the previous year.
South Korean K-pop girl group Blackpink are to make Kaohsiung the first stop on their Asia tour when they perform at Kaohsiung National Stadium on Oct. 18 and 19, the event organizer said yesterday. The upcoming performances will also make Blackpink the first girl group ever to perform twice at the stadium. It will be the group’s third visit to Taiwan to stage a concert. The last time Blackpink held a concert in the city was in March 2023. Their first concert in Taiwan was on March 3, 2019, at NTSU Arena (Linkou Arena). The group’s 2022-2023 “Born Pink” tour set a
CPBL players, cheerleaders and officials pose at a news conference in Taipei yesterday announcing the upcoming All-Star Game. This year’s CPBL All-Star Weekend is to be held at the Taipei Dome on July 19 and 20.
The Taiwan High Court yesterday upheld a lower court’s decision that ruled in favor of former president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) regarding the legitimacy of her doctoral degree. The issue surrounding Tsai’s academic credentials was raised by former political talk show host Dennis Peng (彭文正) in a Facebook post in June 2019, when Tsai was seeking re-election. Peng has repeatedly accused Tsai of never completing her doctoral dissertation to get a doctoral degree in law from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 1984. He subsequently filed a declaratory action charging that
The Hualien Branch of the High Court today sentenced the main suspect in the 2021 fatal derailment of the Taroko Express to 12 years and six months in jail in the second trial of the suspect for his role in Taiwan’s deadliest train crash. Lee Yi-hsiang (李義祥), the driver of a crane truck that fell onto the tracks and which the the Taiwan Railways Administration's (TRA) train crashed into in an accident that killed 49 people and injured 200, was sentenced to seven years and 10 months in the first trial by the Hualien District Court in 2022. Hoa Van Hao, a
RSS