ASIA PACIFIC (AP) Czech Senate speaker plans to visit Taiwan, angering China. (Reuters) Taiwan warns off Chinese fighters which approached island. (Reuters) Taiwan eyes $1.3 billion in foreign tech investment under new scheme. (The National Interest) Why Taiwan Needs Nuclear Weapons

ASIA PACIFIC

June 1, 2020

----

World

Czech Senate speaker plans to visit Taiwan, angering China

Associated PressJune 9, 2020, 4:09 AM PDT

https://www.yahoo.com/news/czech-senate-speaker-plans-visit-110933792.html

FILE - In this file photo taken Monday, Jan. 13, 2020, mayor of Prague Zdenek Hrib, left, and Taipei city mayor Ko Wen-je shake hands before signing a partnership agreement between the two cities at the Old Town Square in Prague, Czech Republic. Speaker of the upper house of the Czech Parliament Milos Vystrcil announced on Tuesday June 9, 2020, that he will visit Taiwan despite threats from China. Vystrcil said he would be accompanied by a business delegation on his visit that is preliminary scheduled to open on August 30. (AP Photo/Petr David Josek, File)

PRAGUE (AP) — The speaker of the Czech Republic's Senate announced Tuesday he will visit Taiwan despite warnings from China and a recommendation from his own government that he not take the trip.

Milos Vystrcil said he would be accompanied by a business delegation on his visit, which is tentatively scheduled to begin Aug. 30.

Vystrcil said he was also planning to meet Taiwan’s leaders, but didn’t immediately give details.

Vystrcil’s predecessor in the post, Jaroslav Kubera, was planning to travel to Taiwan before he died in January. His plans angered pro-China Czech President Milos Zeman.

A letter to Kubera from the Chinese Embassy in Prague warned him against going on the trip, saying the visit would have negatives consequences for future economic relations between China and the Czech Republic.

The Czech Republic has established informal relations with Taiwan but recognizes the one-China principle — the notion that Taiwan belongs to Communist Party-ruled China.

Vystrcil said China's pressure, including a warning from the Chinese Embassy against congratulating Taiwan's pro-independence President Tsai Ing-wen on her re-election, contributed to his decision to travel to the island.

“The People's Republic of China believes it has a right to tell us what to do,” Vystrcil said. He said the Czech Republic will benefit from his trip.

Taiwan is an important business partner for the Czech Republic and has invested more in the Czech economy than mainland China.

In a separate development condemned by China, the Czech capital of Prague signed in January a partnership agreement with Taiwan's capital, Taipei, three months after canceling a similar deal with Beijing.

----

World

Taiwan warns off Chinese fighters which approached island

ReutersJune 8, 2020, 9:53 PM PDT

https://www.yahoo.com/news/taiwan-says-warns-off-chinese-045319761.html

TAIPEI (Reuters) - Taiwan's air force warned off several Chinese fighter jets that briefly entered Taiwan's air defence identification zone to its southwest on Tuesday, the defence ministry said.

The Su-30 fighters, some of China's most advanced jets, were given verbal warnings to leave and Taiwanese air force jets "drove away" the intruders, ministry added.

Taiwan has complained that China, which claims the democratic island as its own, has stepped up military activities in recent months, menacing Taiwan even as the world deals with the coronavirus pandemic.

China says such exercises are nothing unusual.

China has never renounced the use of force to bring Taiwan under its control. One of China's most senior generals last month said China would attack if there was no other way of stopping Taiwan becoming independent.

China is deeply suspicious of Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, whom it accuses of being a separatist bent on declaring formal independence. Tsai says Taiwan is already an independent country called the Republic of China, its official name.

The United States has stepped up its military activities near the island too, with semi-regular navy voyages through the narrow Taiwan Strait.

A U.S. C-40A, a military version of the Boeing 737, had entered Taiwanese air space with permission, though it did not land at any Taiwanese airports, Taiwan's Defence Ministry said in a separate statement on Tuesday.

The U.S. aircraft took off from Japan's Okinawa island, where there is a major U.S. air base, and flew over northern and western Taiwan on its way to Southeast Asia, Taiwanese media reported.

While Washington and Taipei have no formal diplomatic ties, the United States is Taiwan's strongest international supporter and main arms supplier, becoming another source of U.S.-China tension.

(Reporting by Ben Blanchard and Yimou Lee; Editing by Tom Hogue and Stephen Coates)

----

World

Taiwan eyes $1.3 billion in foreign tech investment under new scheme

ReutersJune 3, 2020, 8:56 PM PDT

 

 https://www.yahoo.com/news/taiwan-spend-335-million-woo-035642882.html

 

 

 General view of Taipei city during sunset hour

TAIPEI (Reuters) - Taiwan hopes a new programme will attract T$40 billion ($1.34 billion) of research and development investment by foreign tech companies, creating more than 6,300 jobs a year, the government said on Thursday.
Taipei will spend more than T$10 billion in subsidies over the next seven years to attract the investment, Lin Chuan-neng, the island's vice minister of economic affairs, said on Thursday.
"We will target three investment in three areas, which are 5G, artificial intelligence and semiconductors," Lin told a news conference in Taipei.
"We hope to get them to Taiwan to do research and development," he added. "We hope to boost related supply chains in Taiwan."
The export-reliant island is home to tech behemoths like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd <2330.TW>, the world's biggest contract chipmaker and supplier to U.S. tech giants such as Apple Inc <AAPL.O>.
Lin said the government wants to turn Taiwan into a "global hub for high technology" under the programme, in a bid to "seize the opportunity" amid a global reshuffle of the technology supply chain following U.S.-China trade tensions.
Taiwan's government is in talks with international companies for future investments, Lin added, declining to give details.
($1=29.8960 Taiwan dollars)

(Reporting by Yimou Lee; Writing by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Clarence Fernandez and Gerry Doyle)

----

World

Why Taiwan Needs Nuclear Weapons

Michael Rubin

The National InterestMay 31, 2020, 3:33 PM PDT

 https://www.yahoo.com/news/why-taiwan-needs-nuclear-weapons-223300996.html

 Chinese President Xi Jinping is on the warpath. He has abrogated the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration which guaranteed Hong Kong’s special status more than a quarter-century early. He has precipitated the worst military crisis with India since the 1962 Sino-India War. His repression and incarceration of the Uighur minority is on a scale far greater than what happened during the Balkan wars at the end of the 20^th century. China’s artificial island-building in the South China Sea and its farcical and ahistorical claims to the “Nine-Dash Line” represent a land grab against the Philippines and the theft of maritime resources against other regional states.
Now, Chinese officials are again signaling they may attack Taiwan. On Friday, Li Zuocheng, chief of the Joint Staff Department and member of the Central Military Commission, promised to “resolutely smash any separatist plots or actions.” He added, “We do not promise to abandon the use of force, and reserve the option to take all necessary measures, to stabilize and control the situation in the Taiwan Strait.” What Li sees as “separatist plots or actions,” the Taiwanese might call popular sovereignty and the exercise of democracy. After all, Taiwanese—both those indigenous to the island and those who are more recent immigrants—have a very different narrative, one rooted more in history. They realize that while Chinese officials have long claimed the island nation as an indivisible part of China, historically and with the exception of just a few decades over the course of centuries, Taiwan has been distinct and its own entity. Any visitor to Taiwan can observe this the second they leave the airport.
Authorities in Taiwan cannot afford to take Chinese threats lightly. They recognize that the fact that Western democracies and regional Asian states have offered little more than rhetoric in response to Chinese aggression only emboldens Beijing and makes it more likely the fact that Chinese ‘salami-slicing’ will continue. And while the U.S. Navy will continue to traverse the South China Sea to demonstrate its commitment to maintain freedom of passage in international waters, the Pentagon is simply not prepared to risk war with China to counter the occupation of the Scarborough Shoal or Mischief Reef, let alone the Penghu islands or the Taiwanese mainland.
With communist authorities in China openly and gleefully shredding the post-World War II liberal order, it may be time for the United States and Taiwan to show Beijing the dangers of doing so by allowing Taiwan to become a nuclear weapons power.
The Clinton administration popularized the term “rogue regime” as a state that promoted terrorism or acted aggressively toward its neighbors but for political scientists, the origin of the concept was different. In 1977, for example, political scientist Richard K. Betts spoke wrote about nuclear ambitions among paranoid, pygmy, and pariah states. He defined both Israel and Taiwan as pariah states, not as a moral judgment, but rather because neighboring and regional states posed existential challenges to their national status. Two years later, the New York Times wrote about Israel, Taiwan, and South Africa as “nuclear outcasts” because they might require nuclear weapons to deter existential challenges.
While Israel has never signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and so is not governed by its constraints, Taiwan’s nuclear program was in violation of its treaty obligations. In 1968, Taiwan—then recognized at the United Nations—as the legitimate government of China has signed the NPT and was a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Officially, when Washington and the United Nations shifted recognition of China from Taipei to Beijing, the United States and Taiwan agreed that Taiwan would continue to abide by the NPT. As Taiwan nevertheless quietly pursued a nuclear capability, the Clinton administration acted covertly to sabotage Taiwanese ambitions.
In hindsight, that was a mistake. If the Trump administration wishes to push back on Xi’s aggression, it is time to reconsider the interpretation of Taiwan’s NPT commitments, both in Washington and Taipei. After all, if the international community will not uphold its obligations to Taiwan, then Taiwan should not bend over backward to preserve an order in which the People’s Republic of China is deliberately ending.
Should Taiwan start from scratch and indigenously build its program, it might precipitate further communist Chinese aggression. But, if Taiwan was gifted medium-range nuclear weapons which were placed under its control, it would both acquire a sufficient deterrent in order to maintain stability if not peace across the Taiwan Strait and absolve the United States of the need to deploy multiple carrier groups to the region should communist China attack the only remaining free and democratic Chinese republic.
Now is the time for hard decisions in Washington. If China digests Taiwan as it has Hong Kong, it is unlikely it will simply be satiated. As China faces its own economic turmoil, Xi can put forward baseless claims as fact and encroach further in Southeast Asia, the East China Sea, and the Pacific. And while Taiwan’s membership in the nuclear weapons club will be a blow to the spirit of the NPT, no country should be expected to sacrifice the freedom of 24 million people to preserve order and a system in which the international community lets Beijing deconstruct with ease.
Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). You can follow him on Twitter: @mrubin1971.

Read the original article.