Former deputy head of the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) Chen Ming-chi (陳明祺) has been tapped to fill the deputy foreign minister position as incumbent Tien Chung-kwang (田中光) is to become Taiwan’s new representative to the Netherlands, sources said yesterday.
Tien, who served as deputy minister since July 2020, is to take up the post in Amsterdam that has been vacant since September last year after Chen Hsin-hsin (陳欣新) returned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Taipei headquarters to head its Department of Protocol, a diplomatic source said.
A senior diplomat with four decades in the foreign service, Tien’s most recent overseas posting was as Taiwan’s top envoy to India from 2013 to 2020.
Photo: Fang Pin-chao, Taipei Times
He is also the former ambassador to Tuvalu and has served in other Pacific island countries, as well as Canada and the US.
Tien’s position would be filled by Chen, another source said.
The source said the appointments of Tien and Chen have been approved by Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰), but they did not say when the two would officially assume their respective posts.
Photo courtesy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
The appointment of a former deputy foreign minister to the Netherlands reflected the high priority Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) has given to Taiwan’s cooperation with the Netherlands and the EU as a whole, in particular in the semiconductor sector, the source said.
Chen was the deputy minister of the MAC from July 2018 to June 2022 during then-president Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) administration.
He was also an adviser to the National Security Council before being appointed CEO of the government-funded Institute for National Defense and Security Research in July 2023.
Before engaging in public service, Chen spent more than a decade at National Tsing Hua University, where he was an associate professor at the school’s Institute of Sociology and served as the institute’s director from August 2016 to June 2018.
The anonymous source said Chen has a wealth of experience in international strategic studies and China affairs, and given the ongoing confrontational relations between the US and China, that experience and expertise would be highly useful.
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
WATCH FOR HITCHHIKERS: The CDC warned those returning home from Japan to be alert for any contagious diseases that might have come back with them People who have returned from Japan following the World Baseball Classic (WBC) games during the weekend are recommended to watch for symptoms of infectious gastroenteritis, flu and measles for two weeks, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said. Flu viruses remain the most common respiratory pathogen in Taiwan in the past four weeks and the influenza B virus accounted for 55.7 percent of the tested cases, exceeding the percentage of influenza A (H3N2) infections and becoming the local dominant strain, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said at a news conference on Tuesday. There were 82,187 hospital visits for
Alumni from Japan’s Kyoto Tachibana Senior High School marching band, widely known as the “Orange Devils,” staged a flash mob performance at the Grand Hotel in Taipei yesterday to thank Taiwan for its support after the Great East Japan Earthquake. The show, performed on the earthquake’s 15th anniversary, drew more than 100 spectators, some of whom arrived two hours before the show to secure a good viewing spot. The 26-member group played selections from “High School Musical,” “Beauty and the Beast,” and their signature piece “Sing Sing Sing” and shouted “I love
President William Lai (賴清德) today called for greater mutual aid between Taiwan and Japan in a post commemorating the 15th anniversary of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, saying that “true friendship reveals itself in hardship.” The magnitude 9 earthquake, the largest ever recorded in Japan, and the ensuing tsunami left 18,500 people dead or unaccounted for, and caused a meltdown at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant. It was the world's worst nuclear disaster since the 1986 Chernobyl accident. Japan and Taiwan share a close bond built on mutual aid and trust, Lai said on Facebook, adding that he hopes they would
RSS