As China staged a second day of “punishment” drills yesterday in response to President William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration, some residents said they would carry on with their normal lives despite Beijing’s pressure.
China staged mock missile strikes in waters east of Taiwan and dispatched fighter jets carrying live missiles, Chinese state media reported, as Beijing tested its ability to “seize power” and control key areas of Taiwan.
However, in the nation of 23 million people, life has continued as normal with no overt sign of worry, as Taiwanese have gotten used to decades of living with Chinese threats.
Photo: Ann Wang, REUTERS
China’s military exercises “don’t really affect our daily lives. We still have to work to make money,” said Chen Sian-en, a tire repair shop owner in Kaohsiung.
“From childhood to adulthood, it means that we’ve gotten used to [China’s] threats,” said Chen, 66, adding that the drills were “some kind of intimidation tactic” and a “show of force” from Beijing to Taiwan’s new president.
“They’ve talked about it so many times, but there hasn’t been any real action. If they wanted to take over Taiwan, they would have done it already,” Chen said.
While Taiwanese media have covered the drills, a lot of the focus has instead been on continuing protests against efforts by the opposition to push legislative reforms, and occasional fighting by lawmakers on the floor of the chamber.
“I feel no reason to be scared,” Taipei taxi driver Chuang Jun-sung said. “If China really attacks Taiwan, there’s nothing Taiwan can do but deal with it, but we should still have the guts to fire our missiles back at them.”
The drills are being conducted all around Taiwan, as well as areas close to Kinmen County, and Dongyin (東引) and Wuchiu (烏坵) islands in Lienchiang County near the Chinese coast.
Kinmen resident Tim Chang, 52, said that Beijing has been threatening war for decades.
“If war is bound to happen, if they planned to attack, they would have struck 20, 30 years ago,” he said.
Taiwan’s benchmark index is at a historic high, scarcely impacted by China’s drills. The market closed down 0.2 percent yesterday; on Thursday, the day the drills began, it closed up 0.3 percent.
The stock of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, is also at a historic peak.
“The drills will have a short-term psychological impact, but won’t reverse the long-term upward trend of Taiwan stocks,” Mega International Investment Services vice president Alex Huang (黃國偉) said.
Vasu Menon, managing director of investment strategy at OCBC in Singapore, said that investors were not expecting any dramatic escalation in tensions.
“China’s military has over the past few years carried out regular activities near Taiwan, making investors less sensitive to such drills,” he added.
Still, Kaohsiung resident Angeline Liao said that she was personally “very worried” about the drills.
“If, hypothetically, there were some military [war] activities today, I think I would be the first one to wave the white flag,” the 36-year-old insurance agent said.
GREAT POWER COMPETITION: Beijing views its military cooperation with Russia as a means to push back against the joint power of the US and its allies, an expert said A recent Sino-Russian joint air patrol conducted over the waters off Alaska was designed to counter the US military in the Pacific and demonstrated improved interoperability between Beijing’s and Moscow’s forces, a national security expert said. National Defense University associate professor Chen Yu-chen (陳育正) made the comment in an article published on Wednesday on the Web site of the Journal of the Chinese Communist Studies Institute. China and Russia sent four strategic bombers to patrol the waters of the northern Pacific and Bering Strait near Alaska in late June, one month after the two nations sent a combined flotilla of four warships
THE TOUR: Pope Francis has gone on a 12-day visit to Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and Singapore. He was also invited to Taiwan The government yesterday welcomed Pope Francis to the Asia-Pacific region and said it would continue extending an invitation for him to visit Taiwan. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs made the remarks as Pope Francis began a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific on Monday. He is to travel about 33,000km by air to visit Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and Singapore, and would arrive back in Rome on Friday next week. It would be the longest and most challenging trip of Francis’ 11-year papacy. The 87-year-old has had health issues over the past few years and now uses a wheelchair. The ministry said
TAIWANESE INNOVATION: The ‘Seawool’ fabric generates about NT$200m a year, with the bulk of it sourced by clothing brands operating in Europe and the US Growing up on Taiwan’s west coast where mollusk farming is popular, Eddie Wang saw discarded oyster shells transformed from waste to function — a memory that inspired him to create a unique and environmentally friendly fabric called “Seawool.” Wang remembered that residents of his seaside hometown of Yunlin County used discarded oyster shells that littered the streets during the harvest as insulation for their homes. “They burned the shells and painted the residue on the walls. The houses then became warm in the winter and cool in the summer,” the 42-year-old said at his factory in Tainan. “So I was
‘LEADERS’: The report highlighted C.C. Wei’s management at TSMC, Lisa Su’s decisionmaking at AMD and the ‘rock star’ status of Nvidia’s Huang Time magazine on Thursday announced its list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence (AI), which included Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) chairman and chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家), Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) and AMD chair and CEO Lisa Su (蘇姿丰). The list is divided into four categories: Leaders, Innovators, Shapers and Thinkers. Wei and Huang were named in the Leaders category. Other notable figures in the Leaders category included Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Meta CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Su was listed in the Innovators category. Time highlighted Wei’s
RSS