Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

The Taiwan-US-Japan alliance

Huang Tien-lin 黃天麟

Pro-China academics and media have warned President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) about the rise of China and urged her to take a pragmatic approach to dealing with this issue to deepen cross-strait relations.

However, what is happening on the global stage is moving in exactly the opposite direction. For more than a year, the international political climate has undergone changes advantageous to Taiwan and conducive to an alliance between Taiwan, Japan and the US. This is true economically and militarily.

A different US approach to Taiwan

James Wang 王景弘

Taiwan is the world’s 17th largest trading nation, with aviation routes that extend to all of the world’s major cities. Still, Taiwan’s participation in this year’s International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Assembly was crudely vetoed by China.

Beijing appears unconcerned with those cross-border issues that are in the common interest of humanity: improving hygiene and safety, cracking down on criminals and global warming. Instead, China’s leaders are preoccupied with suppressing Taiwan at every possible turn in an attempt to force it to accept Beijing’s stance on sovereignty.

China’s fascination with currency

Barry Eichengreen

At the start of this month, China’s currency, the yuan, was added to the basket of currencies that make up the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights, or SDR. Previously, the SDR had been defined as a weighted average of the US dollar, euro, British pound and Japanese yen. Now that the yuan has been added, it can claim to be one of just five truly global currencies.

Should we care? The Chinese certainly do. In Beijing, where I was late last month, joining the rarefied SDR club was all people wanted to talk about. (OK, truth be told, they also wanted to talk about Donald Trump.)

Taiwan, the US and a free press

Jerome Keating

Whether one looks at the practice of democracy in Taiwan or in the US, this year will definitely go down as a historic one, if only because of the presidential elections in each nation.

In Taiwan, this year marked the first time in its history that the public elected a female president, namely Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). This happened even though the DPP had been out of power for the previous eight years.

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