Several academics said yesterday that China's recent "energy diplomacy" has greatly narrowed Taiwan's diplomatic room for maneuver and harmed Taipei's diplomatic relations with its allies in Central and South America.
The academics were speaking in a seminar on China's energy strategic deployment and Taiwan's energy security.
Associate Professor Hsiang Chun (向駿) of the National Defense University said that China has played the role of a "world factory" in recent years, causing its demand for energy to skyrocket.
Beijing's "energy diplomacy" serves three purposes, Hsiang said. It helps China meet its own energy needs, but also aims at sharing risk with other oil-producing countries and upgrading its stature in the international community.
Hsiang said that China's expanding energy purchases in Central and South America will have a negative impact on Taiwan's relations with its diplomatic allies. Out of 26 countries that maintain diplomatic relations with Taiwan, 13 are in Central and South America.
Lai I-chung (
China dangles the carrot of its vast market before other countries and asks them to support China's position on Taiwan, and to block proposals related to Taiwan in international meetings, Lai said.
China's recent inroads into Central and South America will also squeeze Taiwan's maneuvering space, he said.
In addition, Taiwan depends heavily on energy imports, with more than 70 percent of its petroleum coming from the Middle East and 40 percent of its coal from China. If China bans its exports and applies pressure to Australia and Indonesia to divert coal to China from Taiwan, there will be major crisis in Taiwan's energy supply of energy, he said.
Professor Tsai Tung-chieh (
The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday said it is fully aware of the situation following reports that the son of ousted Chinese politician Bo Xilai (薄熙來) has arrived in Taiwan and is to marry a Taiwanese. Local media reported that Bo Guagua (薄瓜瓜), son of the former member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, is to marry the granddaughter of Luodong Poh-Ai Hospital founder Hsu Wen-cheng (許文政). The pair met when studying abroad and arranged to get married this year, with the wedding breakfast to be held at The One holiday resort in Hsinchu
The Taipei Zoo on Saturday said it would pursue legal action against a man who was filmed climbing over a railing to tease and feed spotted hyenas in their enclosure earlier that day. In videos uploaded to social media on Saturday, a man can be seen climbing over a protective railing and approaching a ledge above the zoo’s spotted hyena enclosure, before dropping unidentified objects down to two of the animals. The Taipei Zoo in a statement said the man’s actions were “extremely inappropriate and even illegal.” In addition to monitoring the hyenas’ health, the zoo would collect evidence provided by the public
A decision to describe a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement on Singapore’s Taiwan policy as “erroneous” was made because the city-state has its own “one China policy” and has not followed Beijing’s “one China principle,” Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Tien Chung-kwang (田中光) said yesterday. It has been a longstanding practice for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to speak on other countries’ behalf concerning Taiwan, Tien said. The latest example was a statement issued by the PRC after a meeting between Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財) and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on the sidelines of the APEC summit
A road safety advocacy group yesterday called for reforms to the driver licensing and retraining system after a pedestrian was killed and 15 other people were injured in a two-bus collision in Taipei. “Taiwan’s driver’s licenses are among the easiest to obtain in the world, and there is no mandatory retraining system for drivers,” Taiwan Vision Zero Alliance, a group pushing to reduce pedestrian fatalities, said in a news release. Under the regulations, people who have held a standard car driver’s license for two years and have completed a driver training course are eligible to take a test
RSS