A former Japanese representative to Taiwan has urged his country to support Taiwan’s admission to a free-trade agreement between Canada and 10 other countries in the Asia-Pacific region.
Judging by Taiwan’s economic scale and geopolitical importance in the Taiwan Strait, it is fully eligible to become a member of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), said Tadashi Ikeda, former chief representative of the Interchange Association’s, Taipei office.
The association, now called the Japan-Taiwan Exchange Association, represents Japan’s interests in Taiwan in the absence of diplomatic ties, which ended in 1972.
The CPTPP came into being after US President Donald Trump pulled the US out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), soon after he took office in January 2017.
Taiwan had hoped to join the TPP, which was signed in February 2016, but was not ratified.
Commenting on Taiwan’s Jan. 11 presidential and legislative elections, Ikeda said that Japan respected the public’s opinion.
President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) defeated Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜), the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) candidate, winning 57.1 percent of the vote compared with Han’s 38.6 percent, while her Democratic Progressive Party retained its legislative majority, taking 61 seats.
Ikeda said he felt the elections were an opportunity for voters to judge Tsai’s performance over the past four years, but he felt their major focus was on how Taiwan should keep its distance from China.
Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests and Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) proposal to apply Beijing’s “one country, two systems” formula to Taiwan aroused fear that Taiwan could be annexed by China and fueled support for Tsai, he said.
Taiwan is an important partner for Japan, with shared values and close economic ties, Ikeda said, adding that the two nations should further bolster their substantive unofficial ties.
Japan should throw its support behind Taiwan’s bid to join the Japan-led CPTPP, while the two nations should engage in closer security exchanges and dialogue, and promote exchanges between government officials, he said.
Taiwan and Japan should discuss protecting each other’s harbors and bays in the event of an emergency, and talks should be held to come up with measures to respond to cyberattacks, he said.
Senior Taiwanese officials could make transit stops in Osaka, Japan, when visiting allies in the Pacific, Ikeda added.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods