Former deputy head of the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) Chen Ming-chi (陳明祺) has been tapped to fill the deputy foreign minister position as incumbent Tien Chung-kwang (田中光) is to become Taiwan’s new representative to the Netherlands, sources said yesterday.
Tien, who served as deputy minister since July 2020, is to take up the post in Amsterdam that has been vacant since September last year after Chen Hsin-hsin (陳欣新) returned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Taipei headquarters to head its Department of Protocol, a diplomatic source said.
A senior diplomat with four decades in the foreign service, Tien’s most recent overseas posting was as Taiwan’s top envoy to India from 2013 to 2020.
Photo: Fang Pin-chao, Taipei Times
He is also the former ambassador to Tuvalu and has served in other Pacific island countries, as well as Canada and the US.
Tien’s position would be filled by Chen, another source said.
The source said the appointments of Tien and Chen have been approved by Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰), but they did not say when the two would officially assume their respective posts.
Photo courtesy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
The appointment of a former deputy foreign minister to the Netherlands reflected the high priority Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) has given to Taiwan’s cooperation with the Netherlands and the EU as a whole, in particular in the semiconductor sector, the source said.
Chen was the deputy minister of the MAC from July 2018 to June 2022 during then-president Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) administration.
He was also an adviser to the National Security Council before being appointed CEO of the government-funded Institute for National Defense and Security Research in July 2023.
Before engaging in public service, Chen spent more than a decade at National Tsing Hua University, where he was an associate professor at the school’s Institute of Sociology and served as the institute’s director from August 2016 to June 2018.
The anonymous source said Chen has a wealth of experience in international strategic studies and China affairs, and given the ongoing confrontational relations between the US and China, that experience and expertise would be highly useful.
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