Tag: Taiwan

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Health

Taiwan Orders Some Tech Employees to Keep Indoors to Sort out an Outbreak

Taiwan Orders Some Tech Workers to Stay Indoors to Tackle an Outbreak

TAIPEI, Taiwan – Officials in a county in Taiwan face a storm of criticism after banning foreign workers from going outside to eradicate a cluster of coronavirus infections among workers at several technology manufacturers.

As part of the measures announced by authorities in the central Miaoli district last week, thousands of migrant workers, mostly from Vietnam and the Philippines, will be prevented from leaving their dormitories except to travel to and from their jobs in high-tech factories. Some workers expressed concerns that conditions in the cramped dormitories, where up to six people share a room, could further spread the virus.

Other workers who were in close contact with infected colleagues were confiscated in quarantine centers. In some of these facilities, activists said workers were served spoiled food or lack of running water.

The officials did not say how long the restrictions apply. At a press conference last week, Miaoli County Magistrate Hsu Yao-chang denied complaints from migrant workers.

“They tested positive and even died from the virus,” he said. “Why talk about human rights now?”

On Friday, Miaoli County reported 26 new infections, mostly among migrant workers, bringing the total number of confirmed cases related to the factories to more than 450, according to the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control. More than 300 packages were found at the hardest hit company, King Yuan Electronics, a semiconductor chip testing and packaging company.

Some workers said they understood the reasons for the restrictions, but argued that they were selecting foreign workers. Taiwanese workers, most of whom work as managers and supervisors in the factories, were allowed to come and go as they pleased, many foreign workers said.

“This is discrimination,” said John Ray Tallud, 29, a Filipino equipment engineer with King Yuan Electronics, in a telephone interview from his dormitory. “Local Taiwanese can go outside anytime.”

Throughout the pandemic, migrant workers were among the most vulnerable groups in the world. Singapore banned hundreds of thousands of low-paid foreign workers from leaving their dormitories for months after the major outbreaks last year. Rural laborers in the United States were considered indispensable and continued to work shoulder to shoulder in the fields, although many became infected.

Until recently, Taiwan was an exception – a covid-free island for most of the pandemic, with tight border controls making it difficult for companies to accept more migrant workers. As a result, union activists say the existing migrant workers – more than 700,000 workers, most from Southeast Asian countries – have gained bargaining power with their employers.

That changed with the recent outbreak. Advocates of migrant workers have criticized the Miaoli government for creating further fear and stigmatization of foreign workers. Many said the order exposed longstanding discrimination against workers who have become a vital, if largely invisible, pillar of the Taiwanese economy – especially its important high-tech industries.

“This is a clear case of injustice,” said Chang Cheng, founder of 4-Way Voice, a multilingual publication for migrant workers in Taiwan. “If we talk about Taiwan’s main industries, they couldn’t survive without these foreign workers.”

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Business

Public well being prof on Taiwan outbreak, vaccination progress

Public health prof on Taiwan outbreak, vaccination progress

The recent Covid-19 outbreak in Taiwan is a lesson that a containment strategy that targets zero local transmission may not be sustainable in the long term, a public health professor said Tuesday.

Before the recent explosion in cases, Taiwan had reported very few Covid infections for over a year – and most were imported. This allowed daily activities to continue largely normally and the island received international praise for its containment measures.

But it made Taiwan “completely vulnerable” to new variants of the coronavirus that are more communicable and potentially more serious, said Benjamin Cowling, professor and head of the epidemiology and biostatistics department at the University of Hong Kong’s School of Public Health.

“Probably less than 1% of their population have a natural infection, and therefore natural immunity, and … less than 1% have been vaccinated – so they are almost entirely susceptible,” Cowling told CNBC’s Squawk Box Asia.

Taiwan, with a population of around 24 million, has reported more than 8,500 confirmed Covid cases and 124 deaths as of Monday, official data showed.

It is a warning to other parts of Asia that this strategy of elimination is also trying, it is not necessarily sustainable in the long run.

Benjamin Cowling

Hong Kong University School of Public Health

Cowling said Taiwan will have a hard time controlling the recent outbreak. Authorities may need tougher social distancing measures as testing capacity hasn’t been ramped up enough and the island’s vaccination progress has been slow, he added.

“It is a warning to other parts of Asia that are also trying this elimination strategy, it is not necessarily sustainable in the long term,” said the professor.

Asian economies have generally shown lower tolerance to Covid infection compared to their competitors in other regions.

Governments in Hong Kong and Singapore, for example, have been quick to tighten measures to curb small upward movements in cases. Meanwhile, countries like the US and UK are still reporting thousands of cases every day, but faster vaccination has allowed countries to lift restrictions.

Like many of its regional competitors in Asia, Taiwan faced challenges in securing Covid vaccines, Cowling said. Part of Taiwan’s hurdle is politics, the professor said.

Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen said in a Facebook post last week that the government had bought vaccines developed by AstraZeneca and Moderna. She accused China Blocking of a deal with Germany’s BioNTech, which has developed a vaccine together with US pharmaceutical company Pfizer.

Beijing rejects Tsai’s allegations.

China claims Taiwan as a runaway province that will one day have to be reunited with the mainland – if necessary by force. The Chinese Communist Party has never ruled Taiwan, which is a democratic, self-governing island.

“There are a lot of policies out there when it comes to getting vaccines into Taiwan,” Cowling said. “I think they will do it, but right now they won’t be able to vaccinate enough people to stop the current outbreak. They have to use social distancing and bans to deal with it.”

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Business

Asia’s greatest and worst inventory markets in Might battle Covid: India, Vietnam, Taiwan

Asia's best and worst stock markets in May battle Covid: India, Vietnam, Taiwan

Pedestrians wearing protective masks walk past the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) building in Mumbai, India, on Thursday, Jan. 21, 2021.

Dhiraj Singh | Bloomberg | Getty Images

India stocks were among Asia-Pacific’s top-performing markets in May, even as the country continues to grapple with tens of thousands of new cases every day.

For the month, the Nifty 50 rose 6.5% while the BSE Sensex was up 6.47%.

“The old phrase ‘go away and sell in May’ wasn’t true — at least for this month,” said Tuan Huynh, who is chief investment officer for Europe and Asia-Pacific at Deutsche Bank International Private Bank. “In the Indian case, I think it is relatively surprising.”

“The markets seem to like to differentiate between economic and obviously corporate earnings development versus then the rise of the new cases,” he told CNBC’s “Street Signs Asia” on Tuesday.

India has registered more than 28 million infections so far and is the second worst-hit country in the world in terms of caseload, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. Daily cases have eased from the record high of over 400,000 at the start of May — but continue to hover above 100,000. That’s still quite high compared to other countries in the world.

U.S. investment bank Goldman Sachs is “overweight” on India, and expects stocks there to outperform.

“Markets tend to, as they say, live in the future and not in the present,” Timothy Moe, co-head of Asia macro research and chief Asia-Pacific equity strategist at Goldman Sachs, told CNBC last week.

He pointed out that there’s a “very concerning humanitarian crisis” in terms of a Covid surge in India. However, “the market is basically looking through that and expecting the rate of infections to come down, which indeed has taken place.”

Asia’s best and worst performers

Meanwhile, Vietnam was Asia-Pacific’s best-performing market in May — the VN Index jumping 7.15% for the month.

The gains came despite Vietnam’s Covid situation taking a turn for the worse in recent weeks. State-run media reported that social distancing measures were imposed in the country’s business hub Ho Chi Minh City starting Monday this week.

Elsewhere, stocks in Taiwan took a beating in May as rising cases of domestic infections prompted tighter restrictions.

The Taiex in Taiwan was Asia-Pacific’s worst performing market in May, and fell 2.84% for the month.

Taiwan was once hailed internationally for its initial response to the pandemic, which enabled life in Taiwan to remain largely undisturbed compared to elsewhere. However, a recent spike in infections has resulted in measures such as mandatory mask-wearing and limits on indoor and outdoor gatherings.

Total infections in both Vietnam and Taiwan remain comparatively low globally. Vietnam has reported more than 7,300 cases while Taiwan has seen at least 8,511 infections, according to Hopkins data.

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World News

Taiwan Drought: Residents Pray for Rain and Scramble to Save Water

Taiwan Drought: Residents Pray for Rain and Scramble to Save Water

TAICHUNG, Taiwan — Lin Wei-Yi once gave little thought to the water sluicing through her shower nozzle, kitchen faucet and garden hose.

But as Taiwan’s worst drought in more than half a century has deepened in recent weeks, Ms. Lin, 55, has begun keeping buckets by the taps. She adopted a neighbor’s tip to flush the toilet five times with a single bucket of water by opening the tank and directly pouring it in. She stopped washing her car, which became so filthy that her children contort themselves to avoid rubbing against it.

The monthslong drought has nearly drained Taiwan’s major reservoirs, contributed to two severe electricity blackouts and forced officials to restrict the water supply. It has brought dramatic changes to the island’s landscape: The bottoms of several reservoirs and lakes have been warped into cracked, dusty expanses that resemble desert floors. And it has transformed how many of Taiwan’s 23.5 million residents use and think about water.

“We used too much water before,” Ms. Lin said this week in the central city of Taichung. “Now we have to adapt to a new normal.”

No typhoons made landfall in Taiwan last year, the first time since 1964. Tropical cyclones are a prime source of precipitation for the island’s reservoirs. Some scientists say the recent lack of typhoons is part of a decades-long pattern linked to global warming, in which the intensity of storms hitting Taiwan has increased but their annual frequency has decreased.

Ordinary rainfall has also been drastically lower than normal this year, particularly in the central region that includes Taichung, a city of 2.8 million people and the second-largest on the island. The water shortage could begin to ease this weekend if heavy rains arrive on Saturday, as some forecasters predict. But as of Friday, the water levels at two main reservoirs that supply Taichung and other central cities were hovering between 1 percent and 2 percent of normal capacity.

In a few cases, the usual residents of the island’s lakes and reservoirs — fish — were replaced by other species: tourists and social media influencers taking pictures of the visually startling terrain for Instagram posts. In one of the most photogenic locations, Sun Moon Lake, a reservoir in central Taiwan, the receding waterline has revealed tombstones that historians say may date to the Qing dynasty.

“It’s been meltingly hot in Taichung for a while now,” said Huang Ting-Hsiang, 27, a chef who works out of his home and stopped cooking last month for lack of water. “The images of the dangerously low levels at those reservoirs are scary, but there’s nothing we can do.”

To fight the drought, the government has been drawing water from wells and seawater desalination plants, flying planes and burning chemicals to seed clouds above reservoirs, and halting irrigation over an area of farmland nearly the size of New York City.

It has also severely restricted residential water deliveries. In Taichung and other hard-hit cities, the taps have been cut off for two days a week since early April. Some residents have low water pressure even on the other days. Officials have said the curbs will become more severe, starting on Tuesday, if the heavy rainfall that is expected over the weekend does not materialize.

Lo Shang-Lien, a professor at the Graduate Institute of Environmental Engineering at National Taiwan University, said that the current restrictions were necessary in part because people on the island tend to use a lot of water.

In Taichung, the daily rate of domestic consumption per person is 283 liters, or nearly 75 gallons, according to government data from 2019. In Taipei, the capital, it is 332 liters per day. By contrast, average residential water consumption in Europe is about 144 liters per person per day and 310 liters in the United States, according to official estimates.

Professor Lo said that Taiwan’s water usage was relatively high in part because its water prices — some of the lowest in Asia, according to Fitch Ratings — incentivize excess consumption. “Given all the extreme climatic events of recent years, water policies have become something that we need to reconsider and replan,” he said.

Raising those prices would be politically sensitive, though, and a spokesperson for the Water Resources Agency said that the government had no immediate plans to do so.

For now, many people in Taiwan are watching the skies and praying for rain.

In one sign of the public mood, more than 8,000 social media users tuned in to a recent government livestream of an hourlong afternoon thunderstorm at a reservoir in northern Taiwan. A bubble tea shop in the northern city of Taoyuan said that it would stop serving ice with drinks until the water restrictions were lifted. And in Taichung, irrigation officials held a rain-worshiping ceremony at a temple — the first such event there since 1963 and only the fourth since the temple was built, in 1730.

Ms. Lin, who stopped washing her car, cleans dishes in an assembly line of metal pots with dishwater that she arranges from dirtiest to cleanest.

“I still need to wash whatever I need to wash,” she said, “but now every drop needs to be used twice.”

For the first few weeks of the rationing, some people looked for ways to escape life without running water. Ms. Lin went sightseeing in the eastern city of Hualien and visited one of her daughters in Taipei. Others went bathing in hot springs.

Lin Ching-tan, who owns the Kylin Peak Hotspring resort in Taichung, said that he had lowered the admission price by half, to about $5, as a humanitarian gesture. He also started bathing at work before going home in the evenings.

“If you don’t have water to take a shower, it can be torture,” he said.

But as the government restricts movement in an effort to fight Taiwan’s most severe coronavirus outbreak since the start of the pandemic, more of the island’s residents are stuck at home, looking for creative ways to make scarce water supplies last longer. On Facebook and other social media platforms, people have been sharing water-saving tips, including how to flush toilets more efficiently or install a second rooftop water tank.

Mr. Huang, the chef, said that he and his family have a system for storing water in buckets, pots and tanks before their taps run dry every Tuesday and Wednesday. They also try to order takeout so that they won’t have to use water for cooking, he added, although their favorite restaurants and food stalls sometimes close for the same reason.

Ms. Lin’s system includes placing a plastic container under her feet while showering, then flushing the toilet with it.

This week, on her balcony, she poured used kitchen water over some flowers but left others to wilt. “There’s no turning back from extreme weather,” she said. “Developing good habits for saving water is probably just a rehearsal for frequent droughts of the future.”

Amy Chang Chien reported from Taichung, Taiwan, and Mike Ives from Hong Kong.

Categories
Politics

Threat of Nuclear Struggle Over Taiwan in 1958 Stated to Be Higher Than Publicly Identified

Risk of Nuclear War Over Taiwan in 1958 Said to Be Greater Than Publicly Known

WASHINGTON — When Communist Chinese forces began shelling islands controlled by Taiwan in 1958, the United States rushed to back up its ally with military force — including drawing up plans to carry out nuclear strikes on mainland China, according to an apparently still-classified document that sheds new light on how dangerous that crisis was.

American military leaders pushed for a first-use nuclear strike on China, accepting the risk that the Soviet Union would retaliate in kind on behalf of its ally and millions of people would die, dozens of pages from a classified 1966 study of the confrontation show. The government censored those pages when it declassified the study for public release.

The document was disclosed by Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked a classified history of the Vietnam War, known as the Pentagon Papers, 50 years ago. Mr. Ellsberg said he had copied the top secret study about the Taiwan Strait crisis at the same time but did not disclose it then. He is now highlighting it amid new tensions between the United States and China over Taiwan.

While it has been known in broader strokes that United States officials considered using atomic weapons against mainland China if the crisis escalated, the pages reveal in new detail how aggressive military leaders were in pushing for authority to do so if Communist forces, which had started shelling the so-called offshore islands, intensified their attacks.

The crisis in 1958 instead ebbed when Mao Zedong’s Communist forces broke off the attacks on the islands, leaving them in the control of Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist Republic of China forces based on Taiwan. More than six decades later, strategic ambiguity about Taiwan’s status — and about American willingness to use nuclear weapons to defend it — persists.

The previously censored information is significant both historically and now, said Odd Arne Westad, a Yale University historian who specializes in the Cold War and China and who reviewed the pages for The New York Times.

“This confirms, to me at least, that we came closer to the United States using nuclear weapons” during the 1958 crisis “than what I thought before,” he said. “In terms of how the decision-making actually took place, this is a much more illustrative level than what we have seen.”

Drawing parallels to today’s tensions — when China’s own conventional military might has grown far beyond its 1958 ability, and when it has its own nuclear weapons — Mr. Westad said the documents provided fodder to warn of the dangers of an escalating confrontation over Taiwan.

Even in 1958, officials doubted the United States could successfully defend Taiwan using only conventional weapons, the documents show. If China invaded today, Mr. Westad said, “it would put tremendous pressure on U.S. policymakers, in the case of such a confrontation, to think about how they might deploy nuclear weapons.”

“That should be sobering for everyone involved,” he added.

In exposing a historical antecedent for the present tensions, Mr. Ellsberg said that was exactly the takeaway he wanted the public to debate. He argued that inside the Pentagon, contingency planning was likely underway for the possibility of an armed conflict over Taiwan — including what to do if any defense using conventional weapons appeared to be falling short.

“As the possibility of another nuclear crisis over Taiwan is being bandied about this very year, it seems very timely to me to encourage the public, Congress and the executive branch to pay attention to what I make available to them,” he said about what he characterized as “shallow” and “reckless” high-level discussions during the 1958 Taiwan Strait crisis.

He added, “I do not believe the participants were more stupid or thoughtless than those in between or in the current cabinet.”

Among other details, the pages that the government censored in the official release of the study describe the attitude of Gen. Laurence S. Kutner, the top Air Force commander for the Pacific. He wanted authorization for a first-use nuclear attack on mainland China at the start of any armed conflict. To that end, he praised a plan that would start by dropping atomic bombs on Chinese airfields but not other targets, arguing that its relative restraint would make it harder for skeptics of nuclear warfare in the American government to block the plan.

“There would be merit in a proposal from the military to limit the war geographically” to the air bases, “if that proposal would forestall some misguided humanitarian’s intention to limit a war to obsolete iron bombs and hot lead,” General Kutner said at one meeting.

At the same time, officials considered it very likely that the Soviet Union would respond to an atomic attack on China with retaliatory nuclear strikes. (In retrospect, it is not clear whether this premise was accurate. Historians say American leaders, who saw Communism as a monolithic global conspiracy, did not appreciate or understand an emerging Sino-Soviet split.)

But American military officials preferred that risk to the possibility of losing the islands. The study paraphrased Gen. Nathan F. Twining, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as saying that if atomic bombings of air bases did not force China to break off the conflict, there would be “no alternative but to conduct nuclear strikes deep into China as far north as Shanghai.”

He suggested that such strikes would “almost certainly involve nuclear retaliation against Taiwan and possibly against Okinawa,” the Japanese island where American military forces were based, “but he stressed that if national policy is to defend the offshore islands then the consequences had to be accepted.”

The study also paraphrased the secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, as observing to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that “nobody would mind very much the loss of the offshore islands but that loss would mean further Communist aggression. Nothing seems worth a world war until you looked at the effect of not standing up to each challenge posed.”

Ultimately, President Dwight D. Eisenhower pushed back against the generals and decided to rely on conventional weapons at first. But nobody wanted to enter another protracted conventional conflict like the Korean War, so there was “unanimous belief that this would have to be quickly followed by nuclear strikes unless the Chinese Communists called off this operation.”

Mr. Ellsberg said he copied the full version of the study when he copied the Pentagon Papers. But he did not share the Taiwan study with reporters who wrote about the Vietnam War study in 1971, like Neil Sheehan of The Times.

Mr. Ellsberg quietly posted the full study online in 2017, when he published a book, “Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.” One of its footnotes mentions in passing that passages and pages omitted from the study are available on his website.

But he did not quote the study’s material in his book, he said, because lawyers for his publisher worried about potential legal liability. He also did little else to draw attention to the fact that its redacted pages are visible in the version he posted. As a result, few noticed it.

One of the few who did was William Burr, a senior analyst at George Washington University’s National Security Archive, who mentioned it in a footnote in a March blog post about threats to use nuclear weapons in the Cold War.

Mr. Burr said he had tried about two decades ago to use the Freedom of Information Act to obtain a new declassification review of the study — which was written by Morton H. Halperin for the RAND Corporation — but the Pentagon was unable to locate an unabridged copy in its files. (RAND, a nongovernmental think tank, is not itself subject to information act requests.)

Mr. Ellsberg said tensions over Taiwan did not seem as urgent in 2017. But the uptick in saber-rattling — he pointed to a recent cover of The Economist magazine that labeled Taiwan “the most dangerous place on Earth” and a recent opinion column by The Times’s Thomas L. Friedman titled, “Is There a War Coming Between China and the U.S.?” — prompted him to conclude it was important to get the information into greater public view.

Michael Szonyi, a Harvard University historian and author of a book about one of the offshore islands at the heart of the crisis, “Cold War Island: Quemoy on the Front Line,” called the material’s availability “hugely interesting.”

Any new confrontation over Taiwan could escalate and officials today would be “asking themselves the same questions that these folks were asking in 1958,” he said, linking the risks created by “dramatic” miscalculations and misunderstandings during serious planning for the use of nuclear weapons in 1958 and today’s tensions.

Mr. Ellsberg said he also had another reason for highlighting his exposure of that material. Now 90, he said he wanted to take on the risk of becoming a defendant in a test case challenging the Justice Department’s growing practice of using the Espionage Act to prosecute officials who leak information.

Enacted during World War I, the Espionage Act makes it a crime to retain or disclose, without authorization, defense-related information that could harm the United States or aid a foreign adversary. Its wording covers everyone — not only spies — and it does not allow defendants to urge juries to acquit on the basis that disclosures were in the public interest.

Using the Espionage Act to prosecute leakers was once rare. In 1973, Mr. Ellsberg himself was charged under it, before a judge threw out the charges because of government misconduct. The first successful such conviction was in 1985. But it has now become routine for the Justice Department to bring such charges.

Most of the time, defendants strike plea deals to avoid long sentences, so there is no appeal. The Supreme Court has not confronted questions about whether the law’s wording or application trammels First Amendment rights.

Saying the Justice Department should charge him for his open admission that he disclosed the classified study about the Taiwan crisis without authorization, Mr. Ellsberg said he would handle his defense in a way that would tee the First Amendment issues up for the Supreme Court.

“I will, if indicted, be asserting my belief that what I am doing — like what I’ve done in the past — is not criminal,” he said, arguing that using the Espionage Act “to criminalize classified truth-telling in the public interest” is unconstitutional.

Categories
Business

Treasury Places Taiwan on Discover for Foreign money Practices

The Treasury Department said Friday that it is informing Taiwan, Vietnam and Switzerland of their currency practices, but it reconciled a more conciliatory tone than the Trump administration by ceasing to call one of them a currency manipulator.

The announcement was made in the Treasury Department’s first foreign exchange report under Secretary Janet L. Yellen. The report, which the Treasury Department submits to Congress twice a year, aims to hold United States’ major trading partners accountable for trying to gain an unfair advantage in international trade through practices such as the devaluation of their currencies.

To be classified as a currency manipulator, a trading partner must enter into negotiations with the United States and the International Monetary Fund to address the situation. The flaw is somewhat symbolic, but it can lead to tariffs or other retaliation if the talks break down.

Both Switzerland and Vietnam were on the list of currency manipulators after the Trump administration added them last year, and their removal on Friday means no country is currently facing that designation. Still, the Treasury Department said there are indications that Switzerland, Vietnam and Taiwan are not managing their currencies properly.

“The Treasury Department is working tirelessly to address foreign trade efforts to artificially manipulate their currency values ​​that unfairly disadvantage American workers,” Yellen said in a statement.

The decision is the latest attempt by the Biden administration to ease tensions with American allies after four years of former President Donald J. Trump’s confrontational stance towards international economic diplomacy. It also distracts the United States from Trump’s fixation on bilateral trade imbalances and takes a more holistic view of trade relations.

Revealing the extraordinary economic conditions caused by the pandemic last year, financial officials said they were not attempting to send mixed messages by pointing out that tampering was taking place, rather than labeling it as such.

“This report takes on a more measured and analytical tone in evaluating the monetary practices of US trading partners in relation to the Trump administration’s approach to using the report as a policy tool,” said Eswar S. Prasad, former China head of the International Monetary Fund . He said the Biden administration report “comes up with analytically balanced assessments of foreign exchange interventions by US trading partners.”

The Trump administration labeled Vietnam and Switzerland as manipulators in its 2020 final report, but the Biden administration said there wasn’t enough evidence to support the designation. To obtain the label, the Treasury Department must conclude that a country is manipulating the exchange rate between its currency and the dollar in order to “prevent effective balance of payments adjustments or to gain an unfair competitive advantage in international trade”.

Instead, the Treasury Department said it would pursue “increased engagement” with Vietnam and Switzerland and begin such talks with Taiwan, including calling on trading partners to address the undervaluation of their currencies. There is no fixed duration for the duration of such discussions without a resolution.

In business today

Updated

April 16, 2021, 1:30 p.m. ET

Mark Sobel, chairman of the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum, said the Biden administration is wise to take a more nuanced approach to assessing countries’ management of foreign exchange.

He noted that Switzerland was facing unusual monetary and security challenges and that Vietnam’s foreign exchange reserves were low when it received the manipulator label last year. A government can suppress the value of its currency by selling it in foreign exchange markets and by stocking dollars.

Furthermore, Taiwan, Thailand and South Korea have traditionally been worse offenders than Switzerland and Vietnam, according to Sobel, despite the fact that the United States has avoided asking them to.

“I think the new treasury team is more willing to recognize that the relative political divergence between the US and others is a major factor in this,” said Sobel. “I also think the Trump administration’s approach as a general proposal was much more bellicose.”

Taiwan was the United States’ 10th largest trading partner in 2019, according to the United States Trade Representative’s Office. Vietnam was the 13th largest and Switzerland the 16th.

While the United States has deepened ties with Taiwan in its efforts to confront China, the Biden administration also calls for greater investment in the American semiconductor industry to reduce the nation’s reliance on imports from Taiwan and other countries.

The financial report stated that Taiwan’s central bank “continues to actively intervene in the foreign exchange market” and that “less formal exchange-rate management practices” have prevented the Taiwanese dollar from fully reflecting macroeconomic fundamentals.

Currency analysts have expected the Biden administration to put more pressure on Taiwan to change its foreign exchange practices following the appointment of Brad Setser to a senior position in the office of the United States Trade Representative. As a member of the Council on Foreign Relations in 2019, Mr. Setser wrote in a report that Taiwan had hidden $ 130 billion in reserves to cover up its currency interventions and that the arguments for being named a manipulator were stronger than for the naming of China.

“Taiwan has really intervened on a massive scale to maintain an undervalued currency for competitive advantage,” Setser wrote on Twitter at the time.

The Treasury Department did not label China as a currency manipulator, but instead called on it to improve transparency about its foreign exchange practices.

The Treasury Department has put China, Japan, South Korea, Germany, Italy, India, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand on its currency watch list, adding Ireland and Mexico.

Categories
World News

Biden Backs Taiwan, however Some Name for a Clearer Warning to China

Biden Backs Taiwan, but Some Call for a Clearer Warning to China

WASHINGTON – If anything can turn the global power struggle between China and the United States into actual military conflict, many experts and administrators say it is the fate of Taiwan.

Beijing has increased its military harassment on what it believes to be rogue territory, including threatening flights by 15 Chinese fighter jets near its coast in recent days. In response, Biden government officials are trying to calibrate policies that will protect the democratic, tech-rich island without creating an armed conflict that would be catastrophic for all.

Under a long-standing – and notoriously confused – policy stemming from America’s “One China” position, which supports Taiwan without recognizing it as independent, the United States provides political and military support for Taiwan, but makes no explicit promises to counter it to defend a Chinese attack.

However, as China’s power and ambition grow, and Beijing views Washington as weakened and distracted, a debate is ongoing as to whether the United States should be more committed to defending the island, in part to reduce the risk of China’s miscalculation doing this could lead to unwanted war.

The debate reflects a key foreign policy challenge that the Biden government is facing as it draws up its broader Asia strategy. At the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon, which is reviewing its military stance in Asia, officials are reassessing the rationale of American strategy for a new and more dangerous phase of competition with China.

American officials warn that China is increasingly able to invade the island democracy of nearly 24 million people, located about 100 miles off the coast of mainland China, whose status has been since the retreat of Chinese nationalists and the formation of a government after the communist of Beijing 1949 has owned revolution.

Last month, the military commander for the Indo-Pacific region, Adm. Philip S. Davidson on what he sees as a risk that China may attempt to retake Taiwan by force within the next six years.

The United States has long avoided saying how it would react to such an attack. While Washington supports Taiwan with diplomatic contacts, arms sales, fixed language, and even the occasional military maneuver, there are no guarantees. No declaration, doctrine, or security arrangement compels the United States to save Taiwan. A 1979 Congressional law simply states that “any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by means other than peaceful means” would be “a serious concern of the United States.”

The result is known as “strategic ambiguity,” a careful balance so as not to provoke Beijing or encourage Taiwan to make a formal declaration of independence that could lead to a Chinese invasion.

Biden government officials formulating their China policy are paying special attention to Taiwan, trying to determine whether strategic ambiguity is sufficient to protect the increasingly vulnerable island from Beijing’s drafts. But they also recognize that after two decades of bloody and costly conflict in the Middle East, Americans may be unfavorable to new, distant military commitments.

For this reason, Admiral Davidson raised his eyebrows last month when, under questioning, contrary to usual government news, he confirmed that the policy “should be reconsidered” and added, “I look forward to hearing from you.”

“I think there has been a change in the way people think,” said Richard N. Haass, former director of policy planning at the State Department under President George W. Bush and now president of the Foreign Relations Council. “What you have seen over the past year is an acceleration of concern in the United States about Taiwan.” He described the feeling that “this delicate situation, which for decades seemed to have been successfully mastered or refined, suddenly awoke people with the possibility that this era has come to an end”.

Mr. Haass helped stimulate conversation on the matter last year after he published an article in the September issue of Foreign Affairs Magazine declaring that strategic ambiguity had “taken its course”.

“It is time for the United States to adopt a policy of strategic clarity: one that makes it clear that the United States would respond to any Chinese use of force against Taiwan,” wrote Haass with colleague David Sacks.

Mr. Haass and Mr. Sacks added that after four years under President Donald J. Trump ranting “endless wars” and openly questioning United States relations, Chinese leader Xi Jinping may question America’s willingness to its alliances to defend security commitments. A clearer promise, while more hawkish-sounding, would be safer, they argued.

“Such policies would reduce the likelihood of misjudging China, which is the most likely catalyst for a cross-strait war,” wrote Haass and Sacks.

In the past few months the idea has grown in prominence, including on Capitol Hill.

Florida Republican Senator Rick Scott has tabled a bill that would authorize the president to use military action to defend Taiwan against a Chinese attack – no longer making America’s intentions ambiguous. When Mr. Haass testified last month before a committee on the Foreign Relations Committee of the House of Representatives on Asia, he was filled with questions about how to deter the Chinese threat to Taiwan.

Speaking at a Washington Post event in February, Robert M. Gates, a former Secretary of Defense and CIA director who served under presidents of both parties, including Bush and Barack Obama, identified Taiwan as the facet of US relations and China, that was what concerned him most.

Mr. Gates said it “may be time to abandon our longstanding strategy of strategic ambiguity with Taiwan”.

The thought gained another unlikely support when former Representative Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat and longtime diver in military matters, argued in an opinion piece in The Hill newspaper last month that the United States must guarantee, for human rights reasons, that one flourishing Asian democracy is protected from “being violently immersed in an outrageously brutal regime that exemplifies the denial of basic human rights”.

Mr. Frank cited China’s “imperviousness to other considerations” as violence as a reason “to save 23 million Taiwanese from the loss of their basic human rights.”

Though Taiwan has limited territorial value, it has also gained greater strategic importance in recent years as one of the world’s leading manufacturers of semiconductors – the high-tech equivalent of oil in the nascent supercomputing showdown between the US and China microchip supply shortages .

These factors combined have led the Biden government to back Taiwan, which some experts call surprisingly haunting.

When China sent dozens of fighter jets across the Taiwan Strait days after Mr. Biden’s inauguration in January, the State Department issued a statement declaring America’s “rock-solid” commitment to the island. Mr Biden raised the issue of Taiwan during his phone conversation with Mr Xi in February, and Foreign Secretary Antony J. Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan raised their concerns about the island during their meeting in Anchorage last month with two front-line Chinese officials.

“I think people lean back to say to China,” Don’t get the math wrong – we strongly support Taiwan, “said Bonnie Glaser, director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Ms. Glaser said she was surprised at the Biden team’s early stance on Taiwan, which so far has maintained the Trump administration’s heightened political support for the island, a stance some critics have described as overly provocative. She noted that Mr Blinken had recently made a phone call calling for Paraguay’s president to maintain his country’s formal relations with Taiwan despite pressure from Beijing, and that the US ambassador to Palau, an archipelago state in the western Pacific, had recently joined a diplomatic delegation from that country to Taiwan.

“This is really outside of normal diplomatic practice,” said Ms. Glaser. “I think that was pretty unexpected.”

However, Ms. Glaser does not support a more explicit US commitment to Taiwan’s defense. Like many other analysts and American officials, she fears that such a policy change could provoke China.

“Maybe then Xi will be pushed into a corner. This could really lead to China making the decision to invade, ”she warned.

Others fear that a concrete American security guarantee would encourage Taiwan’s leaders to officially declare independence – an act which, given the island’s over 70 years of autonomy, symbolic as it may seem, would cross a clear red line for Beijing.

“Taiwan independence means war,” a spokesman for the Chinese Defense Ministry, Wu Qian, said in January.

Some analysts say the Biden government could manage to deter China without provoking it with more forceful warnings on the brink of explicit promises to defend Taiwan. US officials can also issue private warnings to Beijing that will not put Mr. Xi at risk of losing face in public.

“We only need China to understand that we would come to Taiwan’s defense,” said Elbridge A. Colby, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and troop development under Trump.

The United States has long provided Taiwan with military equipment, including billions in arms sales under the Trump administration that included fighter jets and air-to-surface missiles that Taiwanese planes could use to attack China. Such devices are designed to reduce Taiwan’s need for American intervention if attacked.

But Mr Colby and others say the United States needs to develop a more credible military deterrent in the Pacific to keep up with recent advances by the Chinese military.

HR McMaster, a national security advisor to Mr. Trump, testified before the Senate Armed Forces Committee last month that the current ambiguity was sufficient.

“The message to China should be, ‘Hey, you can assume the United States won’t answer” – but that was also the assumption made when North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950, “McMaster said.

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World News

Taiwan Practice Crash Kills At Least 36 Individuals, Injuring Dozens

Taiwan Train Crash Kills At Least 36 People, Injuring Dozens

TAIPEI, Taiwan – The train, which entered and exited the mountain tunnels along Taiwan’s east coast, was full of people rushing to see family and friends on the first day of a long weekend vacation.

Then, according to the survivors, it was rocked by a serious crash, flew off the rails and slammed against the walls of a tunnel.

The derailment of the eight-car Taroko Express train on Friday morning was the worst such disaster in Taiwan in four decades. At least 51 people, including two train drivers, were killed and around 150 others injured, the authorities said.

Investigators are still trying to find out why the train crashed while traveling from near Taipei to the eastern coastal city of Taitung. However, initial reports indicated that it had either collided with a construction vehicle rolling down a slope onto the track, or was hit by the falling truck as it passed.

By Friday evening, rescue workers had rescued dozens of passengers trapped in the rubble but struggling to get to several wagons deep in the tunnel. Local news showed a worker using an electric circular saw to cut through one of the twisted wagons.

Video footage posted online showed rescuers carrying injured passengers on stretchers as other survivors came out of the tunnel and walked on the roofs of the train carriages, some rolling suitcases. Several passengers described how they smashed the windows of the cars with their luggage in order to escape.

A passenger surnamed Wu told Taiwan’s official news agency that the last thing he remembered before he passed out was a loud crash. When he came to, the train was shrouded in darkness and he and several passengers used the light on their cell phones to see. They tried to help the other injured survivors, he said, but it took them an hour to find their way off the train.

“I’m safe, but I didn’t dare see the crash scene,” he said. “There were a lot of corpses there.”

The crash occurred around 9:30 a.m. in a tunnel north of Hualien City near Qingshui Cliff, a destination popular with tourists who flock to see towering mountains and crystal blue waters. Friday was the annual Tomb Sweeping Day, a time Taiwanese travel a lot. A rail official told Taiwan’s United Daily News that the train had 374 seats and was almost full.

The Taroko Express is one of the fastest to cross Taiwan’s east coast and typically travels at 80 miles per hour. In interviews with local news outlets, survivors described the train as overcrowded, with many passengers standing along the way. Some said in video interviews that the cars they were in were filled with smoke and that they could see passengers who were unconscious and trapped.

The death toll makes the train wreck one of the worst disasters Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen has faced since taking office in 2016. Within hours of the crash, Ms. Tsai said the government had fully mobilized emergency services. She later vowed to conduct a thorough investigation into the cause of the collision.

“We pray that the victims rest in peace and that the injured recover as quickly as possible,” she said at a press conference on Friday afternoon.

In the last major train accident in 2018, 18 people were killed and 170 others injured after a train derailed on a coastal route popular with tourists in northeast Taiwan’s Yilan County. Taiwanese investigators later found that the train was traveling too fast and the driver manually deactivated a System designed to prevent safe speeds from being exceeded.

Train accidents are still quite rare in Taiwan. The last crash of a similar magnitude occurred in 1981 when 31 people were killed in a train collision in the northwest of the island.

A rail official said they believed the construction vehicle driver was parked on a slope near the tunnel entrance and may have forgotten to use the emergency brake, causing the truck to roll off and hit the train as it passed the Central News Agency. The driver is not believed to be in the truck at the time.

A cell phone video filmed of a passenger and posted on social media showed a yellow tag lying on its side next to the derailed train at the entrance to the tunnel.

“Our train crashed into this truck,” said the passenger in the video. He panned the camera and showed a grassy slope near the tunnel. “The truck rolled down and now the whole train is twisted.” Local media posted a photo showing a single truck door lying in the grass.

The police picked up the operator of the construction vehicle for questioning, according to a telephone police officer in Hualien County.

Lin Chia-lung, Taiwan’s Minister of Transportation, told reporters at the crash site on Friday Although he had done his best to strengthen accountability and reform the rail system after the 2018 disaster, “the pace and results of the reforms were clearly insufficient.”

“I am responsible and I should take responsibility,” said Mr. Lin.

Wei Yu-ling, general secretary of the Taiwan Rail Union, said in an interview that she expected the government to conduct a thorough investigation into Friday’s crash, which occurred not long after a maintenance train hit and killed two railroad workers and injured another one inside Taitung is a county in eastern Taiwan.

The recent accidents, she said, “exposed the internal problems of the Taiwanese railway administration from top to bottom.”

Photos of Friday’s online crash showed the damage was severe. A picture from United Daily News, a Taiwanese news agency, showed the train’s apparently mangled control car on its side in the dark tunnel. The train conductor told a local TV station that he was at one end of the train when he felt the emergency brakes apply and a sudden jolt occurred.

“A lot of people were stuck under chairs and piles of bodies,” a woman surnamed Wu told ET Today, a Taiwanese news broadcaster, in a television interview from the hospital where she was treated for minor injuries. “At first I could hear them screaming for help, but then maybe they fell asleep or something. I’ve seen a lot of children too, so pathetic, so pathetic. “

Most of the train traffic on Taiwan’s eastern lines was suspended until Sunday morning, causing delays for many at the start of a long holiday weekend. Tomb Sweeping Day, an ancient Chinese festival also known as Qingming, is a time when the living pay respect to their ancestors by cleaning up their graves and burning paper offerings.

A woman who was traveling home with her husband to sweep the family graves in Taitung told local reporters at the scene of the accident that she was sleeping in the seventh car when the train crashed and knocked her to the ground. The woman’s shirt was bloody and a plaid scarf had been tied around her head to keep the bleeding low.

“We always tried to take the train whenever we could,” she said as rescue workers wearing yellow hard hats worked behind her. “We never thought something like this would happen.”

Joy Dong reported from Hong Kong.

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Business

Covid? What Covid? Taiwan Thrives as a Bubble of Normality.

Covid? What Covid? Taiwan Thrives as a Bubble of Normality.

TAIPEI, Taiwan – As the coronavirus changed lives and economies around the world, Taiwan has been an oasis.

Every day, droplets fly with devotion in crowded restaurants, bars and cafes. Office buildings hum and schools ring out with the screams and laughter of maskless children. In October, a Pride parade drew an estimated 130,000 people onto the streets of the capital Taipei. Rainbow masks were plentiful; social distancing, not so much.

This island of 24 million people, with just 10 Covid-19 deaths and fewer than 1,000 cases, has used its success to sell something flawed: living without fear of the coronavirus. The relatively few people who are allowed to enter Taiwan have flocked and contributed to an economic boom.

“Taiwan felt a little empty for a while. Lots of people were moving overseas and only coming back every now and then, ”said Justine Li, the head chef at Fleur de Sel, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Taichung city that had been booked for a month, and it had been since the fall. “Now some of those occasional guests are withdrawn.”

These Covid migrants are mostly foreign Taiwanese and dual nationals. This included business people, students, retirees and well-known personalities such as Eddie Huang, the Taiwanese-American restaurateur and author. According to the immigration authorities, around 270,000 more Taiwanese have come to the island than in 2020 – about four times the net inflow of the previous year.

Most of Taiwan’s borders have been closed to foreign visitors since last spring. However, highly skilled non-Taiwanese workers have been admitted under a “Gold Card” employment program that the government aggressively promoted during the pandemic. More than 1,600 gold cards have been issued since January 31 of last year, more than four times as many as in 2019.

The influx of people helped make Taiwan one of the fastest growing economies of the past year – one of the few to expand at all, in fact. There was a brief slowdown at the start of the pandemic, but the economy grew more than 5 percent in the fourth quarter from the same period in 2019. The government expects growth of 4.6 percent in 2021, the fastest pace in seven years would be .

Steve Chen, 42, a Taiwanese-American entrepreneur who co-founded YouTube, was the first to sign up for the Gold Card program. He moved from San Francisco to the island with his wife and two children in 2019. After the pandemic broke out, he was joined by many of his friends in Silicon Valley, especially those with Taiwanese heritage – a kind of reverse brain drain.

He and colleagues like Kevin Lin, one of the founders of Twitch, and Kai Huang, co-creator of Guitar Hero, swapped coffee meetings in the Ferry Building in San Francisco for badminton games and poker nights in Taipei. Taiwan’s leaders say the infusion of foreign talent has energized the tech industry, known for its manufacturing expertise rather than its corporate culture.

“This whole chain that you have in Silicon Valley – the entrepreneurs willing to take a risk, the investors willing to write an early check – all of these people have actually come back and are now in Taiwan,” said Mr. Chen lounging on a couch in his office in a government-sponsored common room in Taipei.

“I think it’s a golden era for technology,” he said, “and it dawns on the government that now is the time to really seize that time.”

The surge in returning citizens has put pressure on the short-term rent market. A property manager estimated that the number of double-nationals or overseas Taiwanese looking for housing in 2020 was twice as high as in previous years.

Updated

March 13, 2021, 6:24 p.m. ET

Not all Taiwanese industries flourished. Those who depend on robust international travel, such as airlines, hotels, and tour operators, have achieved great success. However, exports have risen for eight straight months, driven by the supply of electronics and increasing demand for Taiwan’s most important product, semiconductor chips.

Domestic tourism is also booming. Taiwanese who were used to taking short flights to Japan or Southeast Asia are now exploring their homeland. Landmarks like Sun Moon Lake and Alishan Mountain Resort have been inundated with tourists, and by July at least one upscale hotel is booked outside of Taichung.

Orchid Island, a small, coral-ringed island off Taiwan’s east coast, had so many visitors last summer that hotel operators launched a campaign asking them to take two pounds of rubbish with them when they left.

Some aspects of pandemic life have permeated Taiwan’s borders. Temperature controls and hand sanitizing are common, and many public places (though not schools) require masks.

But for the most part, thanks to strict contact tracing and strict quarantine for arriving travelers, the virus was out of sight and out of their minds.

Some returnees, such as 35-year-old Robin Wei, fear their eventual departure.

“We just feel very happy and definitely a little guilty,” said Wei, a product manager for a technology company in the Bay Area, who returned to Taipei with his wife and young son last May. “We feel like the ones who have benefited from the pandemic.”

For many, the return represented a chance to reconnect with Taiwan.

After taking a Masters in Computer Science in Australia, Joshua Yang, 25, a dual Taiwanese-Australian citizen, decided to return in October. The job market in Australia was looking grim, he said, and he took the opportunity to do the military service required of all Taiwanese men under 36.

Mr. Yang wasn’t the only one with this idea. By the time he arrived for basic education in December, Yang said he teamed up with a number of returnees and dual nationals, including an American, a German, a Filipino, and an overseas Taiwanese who had studied in California.

For two and a half weeks of training, Mr. Yang has been allowed to end his service by volunteering at an indigenous history museum in a remote city in southern Taiwan.

“It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, but I don’t know if I would have had the opportunity if it hadn’t been for the pandemic,” said Mr. Yang. “I was able to understand my homeland in a different way through a different lens and learn what it is like for the indigenous peoples of Taiwan who are the traditional owners of the land.”

Many wonder how long Taiwan’s status as a Covid-19 outlier can last, especially as vaccine rollout elsewhere advances. So far, officials have been slow to procure and distribute vaccines, partly because they were so little needed. The government announced just this month that it had received its first batch to be given to medical workers.

Some people, like Tai Ling Sun, 72, are already planning to exit the bladder.

In January, at the urging of friends and family in Taiwan, Ms. Sun and her husband came from California to Kaohsiung, where they grew up. They were concerned for their safety in Orange County, where coronavirus cases were on the rise.

After two weeks in quarantine, Ms. Sun entered a Taiwan that – apart from the masks – looked and felt almost the same as on previous visits. Since then, she has made the most of her stay with a series of routine medical exams that many in the US have delayed since the pandemic began.

A virus-free paradise, however, does not offer immunity to all diseases. Ms. Sun said she was homesick. She longed to see her five children and breathe pristine suburban air. And she added that she wanted a vaccine.

“It was great to be here,” said Ms. Sun. “But it’s time to go home.”

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World News

China says it’s going to sanction U.S. officers for ‘nasty’ conduct on Taiwan

China says it will sanction U.S. officials for 'nasty' behavior on Taiwan

A Chinese and US flag on a booth during the first China International Import Expo in Shanghai, November 6, 2018.

Johannes Eisele | AFP | Getty Images

SINGAPORE – China will impose sanctions on US officials who have acted “badly” in relation to Taiwan, the Chinese State Department said on Monday.

The decision was announced by Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying in response to a reporter’s question about what China would do in response to the lifting of US restrictions on its relations with Taiwan.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced earlier this month that his country would no longer restrict contact between his officials and their Taiwanese counterparts. China hit the decision and vowed to fight back.

China claims Taiwan – a democratic and self-governing island – is its territory that will one day have to be reunited with the mainland. and insists that the island has no right to participate in its own international diplomacy. The Chinese Communist Party has never ruled Taiwan.

Experts have warned that Taiwan will remain a contentious issue in US-China bilateral relations. Former Australian Kevin Rudd, a longtime China observer, told CNBC last week that Pompeo’s move could provide an important foundation for US-China relations.

Rudd was referring to the “One China Policy”, the principle by which the US and the international community recognize that there is only one central Chinese government – under the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing.