A congratulatory telephone call that President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) made to then-US president-elect Donald Trump in 2016 was not an impromptu act and had been planned for six months, former representative to the US Stanley Kao (高碩泰) said on Saturday.
Kao made the remarks during a launch event for his memoir. He served as representative to the US from May 2016 to July 2020 and facilitated the telephone call.
The call took place on Dec. 2, 2016, and marked the first time that a US president or president-elect had directly spoken with a Taiwanese president since the countries severed official diplomatic relations in 1979.
Photo: George Tsorng, Taipei Times
Kao on Saturday said Washington Post foreign policy columnist Josh Rogin in his 2021 book Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, Xi and the Battle for the Twenty-First Century says that the phone call was an “accident” or “improvisation.”
However, he said Rogin’s account is just “one version of the many speculations made about the phone call,” which is incomplete, because Rogin “could not see the forest for the trees.”
Rogin’s version of events fails to give credit to the low-profile, but intensive communications between officials in Taiwan and the US in preparation for the call, whose planning started as far back as the summer of 2016, after Tsai was inaugurated in May that year, Kao said.
Only a handful of people in Washington, himself included, knew of the call before it happened, he said.
In his book, Kao says that Taiwan’s representative office in Washington contacted Trump’s team immediately after learning about his election victory on Nov. 8 in 2016.
Kao said he was so nervous the night before the phone call that he could hardly sleep.
At the time, he was carrying a small piece of paper with the numbers of Trump’s office at all times for fear of a sudden change of mind or schedule on Trump’s part, he said.
Finally, the call went through and Tsai and Trump spoke on the phone for about 10 minutes, double the originally planned time, he said.
Kao said the call was the result of collective efforts from both sides.
Kao entered the foreign service in 1980. He was responsible for North American affairs for most of his 40-year diplomatic career and has served as the nation’s deputy representative to Washington; as well as top representative to Hungary and Italy. He retired in July 2020.
CAUTION: Based on intelligence from the nation’s security agencies, MOFA has cautioned Taiwanese travelers about heightened safety risks in China-friendly countries The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) yesterday urged Taiwanese to be aware of their safety when traveling abroad, especially in countries that are friendly to China. China in June last year issued 22 guidelines that allow its courts to try in absentia and sentence to death so-called “diehard” Taiwanese independence activists, even though Chinese courts have no jurisdiction in Taiwan. Late last month, a senior Chinese official gave closed-door instructions to state security units to implement the guidelines in countries friendly to China, a government memo and a senior Taiwan security official said, based on information gathered by Taiwan’s intelligence agency. The
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, said yesterday that it is looking to hire 8,000 people this year, at a time when the tech giant is expanding production capacity to maintain its lead over competitors. To attract talent, TSMC would launch a large-scale recruitment campaign on campuses across Taiwan, where a newly recruited engineer with a master’s degree could expect to receive an average salary of NT$2.2 million (US$60,912), which is much higher than the 2023 national average of NT$709,000 for those in the same category, according to government statistics. TSMC, which accounted for more than 60 percent
The National Immigration Agency (NIA) said yesterday that it will revoke the dependent-based residence permit of a Chinese social media influencer who reportedly “openly advocated for [China’s] unification through military force” with Taiwan. The Chinese national, identified by her surname Liu (劉), will have her residence permit revoked in accordance with Article 14 of the “Measures for the permission of family- based residence, long-term residence and settlement of people from the Mainland Area in the Taiwan Area,” the NIA said in a news release. The agency explained it received reports that Liu made “unifying Taiwan through military force” statements on her online
Tung Tzu-hsien (童子賢), a Taiwanese businessman and deputy convener of the nation’s National Climate Change Committee, said yesterday that “electrical power is national power” and nuclear energy is “very important to Taiwan.” Tung made the remarks, suggesting that his views do not align with the country’s current official policy of phasing out nuclear energy, at a forum organized by the Taiwan People’s Party titled “Challenges and Prospects of Taiwan’s AI Industry and Energy Policy.” “Taiwan is currently pursuing industries with high added- value and is developing vigorously, and this all requires electricity,” said the chairman