Taiwanese officials and experts last week at a forum in Stockholm discussed joint measures to bolster national resilience in confronting the threat of authoritarian expansionism with their Scandinavian and Baltic counterparts.
The Taiwan-Nordic Forum on Wednesday last week focused on securing vital undersea infrastructure, protecting national airspace against intrusion by military aircraft of hostile powers, and potential cooperation between Taiwan and Nordic countries in a Taiwan Strait contingency, event organizer the Institute for Security and Development Policy said.
Representative to Sweden Phoebe Yeh (葉非比) said in her opening speech that Taiwan is under constant threat from hostile Chinese actions conducted at sea and air, and in cyber, legal and psychological domains.
Photo courtesy of the Taipei Mission in Sweden via CNA
Beijing wages its campaign of intimidation amid attempts by authoritarian powers to reshape the international order in their favor, she said.
Taipei seeks peace through strength by investing in a resilient civil defense, the coordinated development of a defense industrial base and its armed forces under the Whole-of-Society Defense Resilience Committee established in 2024, Yeh said.
The committee is tasked with matters concerning national defense, the well-being of the civilian population, crisis response and democratic resilience to protect national sovereignty, promote industrial innovation and facilitate global cooperation, she said.
Taiwan-Nordic partnership is based on shared need to confront comparable strategic challenges, economic and technological collaborations, and common democratic values, she said.
Intelligence-sharing, industrial collaboration and forging democratic supply chains are crucial areas of cooperation, she said.
Last year, Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) proposed the RISK Management Initiative on International Undersea Cables to counter malicious attacks on submarine cables, a threat Taiwan and Nordic countries have dealt with, Yeh said.
The initiative seeks risk mitigation through globally coordinated damage control and repair operations, information sharing among governments in real time, systemic reform of international norms and legal frameworks, and knowledge-building to develop professional capacity, she said.
Taiwan and Nordic countries can improve their cooperation in strategizing against cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns launched by hostile state-level actors, she said.
Experts participating in the forum emphasized the importance of an intergovernmental cooperative framework to tackle sabotage against undersea cables and closing legal loopholes that had allowed ships to enter critical maritime zones to damage undersea infrastructure.
Fast food chain McDonald's is to raise prices by up to NT$5 on some products at its restaurants across Taiwan, starting on Wednesday next week, the company announced today. The prices of all extra value meals and sharing boxes are to increase by NT$5, while breakfast combos and creamy corn soup would go up by NT$3, the company said in a statement. The price of the main items of those meals, if ordered individually, would remain the same. Meanwhile, the price of a medium-sized lemon iced tea and hot cappuccino would rise by NT$3, extra dipping sauces for chicken nuggets would go up
Yangmingshan National Park’s Qingtiangang (擎天崗) nature area has gone viral after a park livestream camera observed a couple in the throes of intimate congress, which was broadcast live on YouTube, drawing large late-night crowds and sparking a backlash over noise, bright lights and disruption to wildlife habitat. The area’s livestream footage appeared to show a couple engaging in sexual activity on a picnic table in the park on Friday last week, with the uncensored footage streamed publicly online. The footage quickly spread across social media, prompting a tide of visitors to travel to the site to “check in” and recreate the
Minister of Digital Affairs Lin Yi-ching (林宜敬) yesterday cited regulatory issues and national security concerns as an expert said that Taiwan is among the few Asian regions without Starlink. Lin made the remarks on Facebook after funP Innovation Group chief executive officer Nathan Chiu (邱繼弘) on Friday said Taiwan and four other countries in Asia — China, North Korea, Afghanistan and Syria — have no access to Starlink. Starlink has become available in 166 countries worldwide, including Ukraine, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam, in the six years since it became commercial, he said. While China and North Korea block Starlink, Syria is not
GROUNDED: A KMT lawmaker proposed eliminating drone development programs and freezing funding for counterdrone systems, despite China’s adoption of the technology China has deployed attack drones at air bases near the Taiwan Strait in a strategy aimed at overwhelming Taiwan’s air defense systems through saturation attacks, the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said. The council’s latest quarterly report on China said that satellite imagery and open-source intelligence indicate that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had converted retired J-6 fighter jets into J-6W drones, which the PLA has stationed at six air bases near Taiwan, five in China’s Fujian Province and one in Guangdong Province. The report cited J. Michael Dahm, a senior fellow at the US-based Mitchell Institute, as saying that China has
RSS