Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) and National Security Council Secretary-General Joseph Wu (吳釗燮) were in the US this week for closed-door meetings with US officials, the Financial Times reported on Thursday.
Wu and Lin were in the Washington area for talks through a format called the “special channel,” the newspaper cited unnamed sources as saying.
Although the “special channel” was first disclosed by the Financial Times in 2021 when Wu met his US counterpart, senior officials from Taiwan and the US have used the mechanism for years to hold talks, it said.
Photo courtesy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
The US government has kept the channel secret to avoid butting heads with Beijing, known for strenuously protesting any sign of diplomatic engagement between Taiwan and other states, it said.
Wu and then-council secretary-general Wellington Koo (顧立雄) met with US officials during the previous “special channel” in February last year, it said.
The security dialogue is usually conducted in the area surrounding Washington, as long-standing practice prevents the nation’s foreign and defense ministers from entering the capital, it said.
Sources did not disclose the location or timing of the talks, the Financial Times said in its report.
The Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office declined the paper’s request for comments, as did the White House.
The special channel is “one of the most sensitive and important mechanisms in global politics today,” Evan Medeiros, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Initiative for US-China Dialogue on Global Issues, was quoted as saying.
“The meeting comes at a critical time given Taiwan’s recent election. Clear and consistent communication between Taipei and Washington is essential, especially as People’s Republic of China pressure grows,” Medeiros said.
The “special channel” was important due to limits on contact allowed by the unofficial relationship between Taiwan and the US, the newspaper cited Project 2049 Institute chairman Randall Schriver as saying.
“A lot of people have the impression that [Chinese People’s Liberation Army] military activity spikes around events like the [former US House of Representatives speaker Nancy] Pelosi visit or [presidential] inaugurations, and then enters a normal and steady status quo, but the PLA continues to do more things and evolve. We are seeing more nighttime exercises and things like air-to-air refueling on the eastern side of Taiwan,” Schriver was quoted as saying.
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
‘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
EVERYONE’S ISSUE: Kim said that during a visit to Taiwan, she asked what would happen if China attacked, and was told that the global economy would shut down Taiwan is critical to the global economy, and its defense is a “here and now” issue, US Representative Young Kim said during a roundtable talk on Taiwan-US relations on Friday. Kim, who serves on the US House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee, held a roundtable talk titled “Global Ties, Local Impact: Why Taiwan Matters for California,” at Santiago Canyon College in Orange County, California. “Despite its small size and long distance from us, Taiwan’s cultural and economic importance is felt across our communities,” Kim said during her opening remarks. Stanford University researcher and lecturer Lanhee Chen (陳仁宜), lawyer Lin Ching-chi
RSS