Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

Taiwan can help NATO defy China

Taipei Times Editorial

NATO leaders in a communique on Monday described China as a threat to the “rules-based international order and to areas relevant to alliance security,” marking a major change of focus for the organization.

They said that China “is rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal,” is “opaque” about its military modernization and is “cooperating militarily with Russia.”

Following the NATO meeting in Brussels, US President Joe Biden assured the alliance that the US would honor its NATO commitments, and said that China and Russia were attempting to drive a wedge between the Washington and European allies.

New PLA air tactics a concern

Taipei Times Editorial

On Tuesday, a total of 28 People’s Liberation Army (PLA) aircraft intruded into southwestern, southern and eastern areas of Taiwan’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ), a record number since the Ministry of National Defense began publishing PLA aircraft movements last year.

Taking off from air bases on China’s east coast, 10 Shenyang J-16 multirole strike fighters, six Shenyang J-11 fighter jets and two Shaanxi KJ-500 airborne early warning and control aircraft flew on a course adjacent to the Taiwan-controlled Pratas Islands (Dongsha Islands, 東沙群島) before turning back.

Common cause against the CCP

Taipei Times Editorial

On Tuesday, Prague Mayor Zdenek Hrib expressed his support for Taiwan on Twitter amid an outbreak of COVID-19 in the nation. In a reference clearly targeted at the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Hrib wrote: “I am appalled that politics is obstructing the delivery of vaccines to Taiwan. Prague supports Taiwan and our sister city Taipei.” Hrib is known to be friendly toward Taiwan, as are some other Czech politicians, including Czech Senate President Milos Vystrcil, who declared “I am a Taiwanese” in the Legislative Yuan in Taipei on Sept. 1 last year.

For that, he was threatened by Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅), and even though Wang, at the time visiting Europe, was subsequently asked to avoid such behavior, there was little pushback from European leaders.

Fast-tracking vaccine batch releases

Huang Weng-foung 黃文鴻

After weathering the COVID-19 pandemic for more than a year, Taiwan has since early last month been hit by a wave of local infections. Before then, few people were concerned about vaccines, but the issue has suddenly become the focus of public attention. The urgency of obtaining vaccines has been much discussed, but many do not understand the peculiarities of the vaccine industry, or international vaccine supply and demand amid a pandemic.

Taiwan’s epidemic prevention policy over the past four decades has been oriented toward public health — from the control and prevention of hepatitis B in the early 1980s and the local development of an avian influenza vaccine in the early 2000s to the development of enterovirus vaccines — with emergency situations receiving temporary policy support, but support for vaccine development ebbed as the epidemics subsided.

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