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.
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,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read: