The Coast Guard Administration yesterday opened a satellite link connecting the coast guard base on Itu Aba Island (Taiping Island, 太平島) to Taiwan proper in a boost to the nation’s foothold in the Spratly Islands (Nansha Islands, 南沙群島).
Ocean Affairs Council Minister Kuan Bi-ling (管碧玲) wrote on Facebook that the activation of the SES O3b mPower, a medium Earth orbit satellite system, was a goalpost for sustaining the coast guard, research and medical personnel who are stationed on the island.
The coast guard would next establish communications with the Taiwanese outpost on Pratas Island (Dongsha Island, 東沙群島), Kuan said.
Photo: Screen grab from Ocean Affairs Council Minister Kuan Bi-ling’s Facebook page
In August last year, Taiwan Statebuilding Party members said that coast guard personnel on Taiping were so poorly equipped when it came to communications that they had resorted to using Chinese cellphones to call home, sparking a public furor.
Taiping, the largest of the Spratly Islands, is 1,600km from Taiwan proper, while Pratas lies 444km from the Port of Kaohsiung, distances too great to justify undersea cables, which presents a unique challenge for the personnel posted on the islands, Kuan said.
The Coast Guard Administration acquired the services of the O3b mPower system through the Ministry of Digital Affairs’ National Digital Resilience Program, which seeks to harden Taiwanese communications infrastructure, she said.
Taiping serves as Taiwan’s international technology technological research cooperation hub, and a base for humanitarian search-and-rescue operations throughout the South China Sea, missions that require robust communications, Kuan said.
The more robust communications capabilities installed on Taiping would allow the island to boost its role to what the government envisioned it to be, she said.
Coast guard personnel assigned to Taiping have reported that the O3b mPower system’s performance is satisfactory, Kuan added.
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
MANAGING DIFFERENCES: In a meeting days after the US president signed a massive foreign aid bill, Antony Blinken raised concerns with the Chinese president about Taiwan US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday met with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and senior Chinese officials, stressing the importance of “responsibly managing” the differences between the US and China as the two sides butt heads over a number of contentious bilateral, regional and global issues, including Taiwan and the South China Sea. Talks between the two sides have increased over the past few months, even as differences have grown. Blinken said he raised concerns with Xi about Taiwan and the South China Sea, along with China’s support for Russia and its invasion of Ukraine, as well as other issues
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B