President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) this week called on the US to sign a free-trade agreement and bilateral extradition treaty with Taiwan, and to grant visa-free entry to Taiwanese tourists.
In an hour-long interview with the New York Times on Thursday, Ma said he was glad to have reduced tensions with China and that he expected the US to make a positive response to the three issues.
The president said he was not concerned that Taiwan was low on US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s list of priorities during her scheduled three-day visit to Beijing from next Friday, but called on Clinton to support the “status quo” across the Taiwan Strait during her visit.
PHOTO: WANG YI-SUNG, TAIPEI TIMES
The lessening of tensions with China “is good news for everyone; we are not dissatisfied with the fact they did not mention Taiwan,” Ma said in the interview.
He had made similar remarks earlier this month in response to Washington and Beijing having made no mention of Taiwan in recent dialogue, when he said that “no news is good news.”
Clinton will also visit Tokyo, Jakarta and Seoul on her Asia trip next week. Climate change, energy, North Korea, Tibet, Iran and economic issues are expected to top her agenda in Beijing.
Ma said he would carry out his campaign promise of making Taiwan a peacemaker, rather than a troublemaker, in the region and vowed to seek closer economic relations with China.
While acknowledging that the number of Chinese tourists allowed to visit Taiwan every day was lower than expected, Ma said the nation’s economy continued to rely heavily on China, and so more cross-strait economic measures, including regular flights to China, would be implemented.
Ma’s administration had forecast the implementation of weekend charter flights would attract 3,000 Chinese tourists per day in the initial stages, with the number expected to grow to 10,000 per day within four years.
Actual arrivals, however, remain at around 500 to 600 per day.
Recent moves to let Chinese tourists remain in the country for up to 15 days instead of 10, and to arrive in groups of as few as five people instead of the current 10-person minimum, could help increase their numbers, Ma said.
The Ma administration has also opened up charter flights, shipping and investment, and the president has said he expected regularly scheduled flights to China by the middle of this year as well.
Ma expressed confidence about the nation’s economic outlook, and said his administration will continue to carry out his economic promises in an attempt to improve the economy, including implementing scheduled flights to China this year and expanding domestic demand.
He said the economy would grow if Taiwan’s main export markets recovered. In the meantime, the government is rapidly stepping up spending on roads, bridges and schools and other infrastructure projects that Ma promised to build during his election campaign.
“This is high time to go fiscal — let’s get fiscal,” he said.
GREAT POWER COMPETITION: Beijing views its military cooperation with Russia as a means to push back against the joint power of the US and its allies, an expert said A recent Sino-Russian joint air patrol conducted over the waters off Alaska was designed to counter the US military in the Pacific and demonstrated improved interoperability between Beijing’s and Moscow’s forces, a national security expert said. National Defense University associate professor Chen Yu-chen (陳育正) made the comment in an article published on Wednesday on the Web site of the Journal of the Chinese Communist Studies Institute. China and Russia sent four strategic bombers to patrol the waters of the northern Pacific and Bering Strait near Alaska in late June, one month after the two nations sent a combined flotilla of four warships
THE TOUR: Pope Francis has gone on a 12-day visit to Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and Singapore. He was also invited to Taiwan The government yesterday welcomed Pope Francis to the Asia-Pacific region and said it would continue extending an invitation for him to visit Taiwan. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs made the remarks as Pope Francis began a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific on Monday. He is to travel about 33,000km by air to visit Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and Singapore, and would arrive back in Rome on Friday next week. It would be the longest and most challenging trip of Francis’ 11-year papacy. The 87-year-old has had health issues over the past few years and now uses a wheelchair. The ministry said
‘LEADERS’: The report highlighted C.C. Wei’s management at TSMC, Lisa Su’s decisionmaking at AMD and the ‘rock star’ status of Nvidia’s Huang Time magazine on Thursday announced its list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence (AI), which included Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) chairman and chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家), Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) and AMD chair and CEO Lisa Su (蘇姿丰). The list is divided into four categories: Leaders, Innovators, Shapers and Thinkers. Wei and Huang were named in the Leaders category. Other notable figures in the Leaders category included Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Meta CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Su was listed in the Innovators category. Time highlighted Wei’s
EVERYONE’S ISSUE: Kim said that during a visit to Taiwan, she asked what would happen if China attacked, and was told that the global economy would shut down Taiwan is critical to the global economy, and its defense is a “here and now” issue, US Representative Young Kim said during a roundtable talk on Taiwan-US relations on Friday. Kim, who serves on the US House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee, held a roundtable talk titled “Global Ties, Local Impact: Why Taiwan Matters for California,” at Santiago Canyon College in Orange County, California. “Despite its small size and long distance from us, Taiwan’s cultural and economic importance is felt across our communities,” Kim said during her opening remarks. Stanford University researcher and lecturer Lanhee Chen (陳仁宜), lawyer Lin Ching-chi