Former vice president Vincent Siew (蕭萬長) and a large delegation of Taiwanese business leaders leave Washington this weekend after conducting high level talks on Taiwan’s relationship with China and its need to expand trade ties with the US.
The group is visiting San Francisco before returning home on Wednesday.
While no details have been released, Siew met privately with members of the US Congress, with US Trade Representative Michael Froman, Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury Marisa Lago and with officials from the US State Department.
Earlier in New York, they met with decisionmakers from top US companies and financial institutions including JPMorgan Chase and Co, Citigroup Inc, Corning Inc and BlackRock Inc.
Siew made one major public address on Taiwan’s need to enter the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade negotiations and gave one interview to the Wall Street Journal.
In the interview, Siew said that Taiwan was not ready for political dialogue with Beijing and there was a need to take care of “economic matters first, before we take care of the political ones.”
He said much work remained to be done, including wrapping up agreements on trade in services, commodities and goods, as well as establishing a dispute settlement mechanism.
“When we can finish this whole project, we can then institutionalize and normalize the trade relationship between Taiwan and China,” Siew told the Wall Street Journal.
He said Taiwan was a democratic society and that the opinion of the general population — as reflected through polls — was that it was still “too premature for us to deal with sensitive and political issues at this juncture.”
As Siew and his party were leaving Washington, the Jamestown Foundation published a paper by Asia writer David Cohen, which said Taiwan’s trade agreements with Singapore and Japan should “calm fears” of China’s economic domination.
“While China has apparently given its blessing to Taiwan to strike trade deals independently, it has also been applying pressure for talks about the island’s political status, as well as pushing for further economic cooperation,” Cohen said in the paper.
“But the mainland appears to be unable or unwilling to interfere with Taiwan’s seeking alternatives — likely calculating that to do so would cost it the political influence it has gained with trade agreements in recent years,” the paper said.
Cohen said that even as China seeks to expand its economic integration with Taiwan it has not stopped the nation from seeking alternative markets.
“While China is a vast and attractive trading partner, its previous efforts to deploy economic coercion have been unimpressive,” he said.
“In order for it to use trade as an effective political weapon, China will have to be not only important but indispensable,” Cohen added.
The Coast Guard Administration (CGA) and Chunghwa Telecom yesterday confirmed that an international undersea cable near Keelung Harbor had been cut by a Chinese ship, the Shunxin-39, a freighter registered in Cameroon. Chunghwa Telecom said the cable had its own backup equipment, and the incident would not affect telecommunications within Taiwan. The CGA said it dispatched a ship under its first fleet after receiving word of the incident and located the Shunxin-39 7 nautical miles (13km) north of Yehliu (野柳) at about 4:40pm on Friday. The CGA demanded that the Shunxin-39 return to seas closer to Keelung Harbor for investigation over the
An apartment building in New Taipei City’s Sanchong District (三重) collapsed last night after a nearby construction project earlier in the day allegedly caused it to tilt. Shortly after work began at 9am on an ongoing excavation of a construction site on Liuzhang Street (六張街), two neighboring apartment buildings tilted and cracked, leading to exterior tiles peeling off, city officials said. The fire department then dispatched personnel to help evacuate 22 residents from nine households. After the incident, the city government first filled the building at No. 190, which appeared to be more badly affected, with water to stabilize the
DEEPER REVIEW: After receiving 19 hospital reports of suspected food poisoning, the Taipei Department of Health applied for an epidemiological investigation A buffet restaurant in Taipei’s Xinyi District (信義) is to be fined NT$3 million (US$91,233) after it remained opened despite an order to suspend operations following reports that 32 people had been treated for suspected food poisoning, the Taipei Department of Health said yesterday. The health department said it on Tuesday received reports from hospitals of people who had suspected food poisoning symptoms, including nausea, vomiting, stomach pain and diarrhea, after they ate at an INPARADISE (饗饗) branch in Breeze Xinyi on Sunday and Monday. As more than six people who ate at the restaurant sought medical treatment, the department ordered the
Taiwan plans to cull as many as 120,000 invasive green iguanas this year to curb the species’ impact on local farmers, the Ministry of Agriculture said. Chiu Kuo-hao (邱國皓), a section chief in the ministry’s Forestry and Nature Conservation Agency, on Sunday said that green iguanas have been recorded across southern Taiwan and as far north as Taichung. Although there is no reliable data on the species’ total population in the country, it has been estimated to be about 200,000, he said. Chiu said about 70,000 iguanas were culled last year, including about 45,000 in Pingtung County, 12,000 in Tainan, 9,900 in
RSS