While Beijing has not prepared Lunar New Year care packages for overseas Taiwanese this year, Chinese embassies in Africa and North America have already issued warnings to expat groups not to invite Taiwanese officials to their holiday events, the Overseas Community Affairs Council (OCAC) said yesterday.
OCAC Deputy Director-General Lee Yen-hui (李妍慧) made the statement during a report at the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Michelle Lin’s (林楚茵) question about whether the Chinese Communist Party is planning to hand out care packages to expat communities over the Lunar New Year holiday, as it has done in previous years.
China threatening overseas communities with “united front” rhetoric is a severe blow to the nation’s whole-of-society defense resilience efforts, Lee said.
Photo: Tien Yu-hua, Taipei Times
During last year’s council meeting, the council told overseas groups to bolster horizontal and vertical communications to fight against China’s cognitive warfare tactics, Lee said.
Many of the committee’s members have already held resilience-boosting talks after returning to their countries, Lee said, adding that the council would be hosting more events and workshops to heighten the awareness of expat student bodies and overseas businesspeople regarding the threats posed by cognitive warfare, fake information, deepfakes and other technologies.
Meanwhile, the council has received six loan cases as of Friday last week since it initiated an overseas credit-guarantee fund to help alleviate financial stress on companies due to US tariffs, Lee said, adding that all were from Vietnam.
The council’s program provides US$300,000 in loans for up to six years to companies that export to the US.
To qualify, the companies must prove that their businesses had experienced at least a 10 percent reduction in profit due to the US’ tariffs.
The OCAC also pledged to subsidize processing fees for the applications for three years and to cover partial interest for up to half a year.
Taiwanese businesspeople have tracks across 79 countries and six continents, with more than 178 Taiwanese business associations worldwide and more than 40,000 members, Lee said.
In light of the international situation and restive geopolitics, the global supply chain system is seeing a trend: The world is splitting up into two camps — the US or China, Lee said.
Transparency in supply chains and diversifying risks are becoming important considerations for the industrial and commercial sectors, she said.
The OCAC is focused on helping industries and companies in Taiwan and abroad build tech platforms that enable cross-industry collaboration, and helping companies maintain a competitive edge, she said.
A magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck off the coast of Yilan County at 8:39pm tonight, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said, with no immediate reports of damage or injuries. The epicenter was 38.7km east-northeast of Yilan County Hall at a focal depth of 98.3km, the CWA’s Seismological Center said. The quake’s maximum intensity, which gauges the actual physical effect of a seismic event, was a level 4 on Taiwan’s 7-tier intensity scale, the center said. That intensity level was recorded in Yilan County’s Nanao Township (南澳), Hsinchu County’s Guansi Township (關西), Nantou County’s Hehuanshan (合歡山) and Hualien County’s Yanliao (鹽寮). An intensity of 3 was
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