Focus Taiwan
Date: 2019/09/12
By: Emerson Lim

Taipei, Sept. 12 (CNA) The first ever U.S.-Taiwan Consultations on Democratic Governance in the

Indo-Pacific Region were launched in Taipei on Thursday.

The annual forum is expected to serve as a mechanism to promote Taiwan's international presence and good governance in the region.

The launch ceremony was held at the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) in Neihu District, Taipei and attended by AIT Director Brent Christensen, U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Scott Busby, Taiwan's Foreign Minister Joseph Wu (吳釗燮), and dignitaries from other countries.

The Consultations were announced in March by Christensen and Wu at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) after Busby raised the idea during his Taipei visit last October.    [FULL  STORY]

Radio Taiwan International
Date: 11 September, 2019
By: Paula Chao

Can you smell the fragrance of BBQ hanging thick in the air? By this Friday, Sept. 13, you’ll know it’s Mid-Autumn Festival in Taiwan by the proliferation of road-side grillers. 

“Wait a minute,” you might say… “Autumn doesn’t even begin until Sept. 23!” And you’d be right. Never fear, in today’s Taiwan Insider, we take a break from the hard news to decode one of the most important holidays of the year for people in Taiwan and across the Chinese-speaking world. 
[FULL  STORY]

National Review
Date: September 11, 2019
By: Therese Shaheen

The imperiled island democracy has become more isolated, and its relationship with the U.S. has grown ill-defined. Trump can and should change that.

Whatever other legacies President Trump leaves after his time in office, he will be remembered as a figure who realigned the GOP by bringing many of its core tenets into question. The party is no longer reliably supportive of multilateral trade agreements and opposed to tariffs. It is no longer interested in reforming entitlements, or in balancing the federal budget. It is no longer a proponent of the overseas deployment of U.S. forces for the sake of maintaining stability in unstable places. None of these shifts are necessarily permanent. To be sure, there will be reassessments of all of them after the Trump presidency, as the party decides what it wants to be going forward.

Here’s another shift, one I hope the party holds firm to over time: For the first time since the Nixon presidency, the GOP is no longer willing to accommodate Beijing. Republicans no longer see China as a benign emerging power to be nurtured as it merges into the society of nations. In action if not in fact, the Trump administration has redefined China as an economic and military adversary, and a human-rights abuser of massive and systematic proportions.

This is an overdue and welcome shift. There are practical actions that the administration can take to ensure that it lasts beyond Trump’s time in office as something more than a bargaining tactic in trade-deal negotiations. An important one is rethinking the role the U.S. has played as the handmaiden in Beijing’s decades-long global isolation of Taiwan.    [FULL  STORY]

Taiwan News
Date: 2019/09/11
By:  Central News Agency

Taiwan's latest defense report, released Wednesday, made public for the first time the military's plans to repel invading Chinese forces along the coast of Taiwan proper as part of the country's new defense strategy adopted since President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) took office in 2016.

In recent decades, the Armed Forces have seen beaches where enemy forces land as the focal point for repelling a potential Chinese invasion, but that emphasis has been broadened to an outer perimeter along the coast since 2017.

Taiwan has been forced to shift its strategy because China has been developing expeditionary warfare and over-the-horizon amphibious assault capabilities that pose a threat all along Taiwan's coastline, a military source previously told local media.

In its 2019 National Defense Report, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) also included a graphic showing exactly how the R.O.C. Armed Forces would repel a Chinese invasion along the coastline.
[FULL  STORY]

Focus Taiwan
Date: 2019/09/11
By: Jiang Ming-yan, Chang Jung-hsiang, Liao Yu-yang and Frances Huang

Taipei, Sept. 11 (CNA) U.S.-based tech giant Google Inc. said Wednesday that it will set up a data center in Tainan that will be its second data center in Taiwan after its first one started operations in Changhua in 2013.

Google said in a statement that it has purchased land in Tainan in preparation for the establishment of the center after an assessment that picked the city as the location for the investment.

The U.S. search engine said it was very grateful for assistance provided by the Industrial Development Bureau of Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA), the Tainan City government, the authorities of the Tainan Technology Industrial Park and Taiwan Power Co. in selecting the location for the center.

No details about the financial terms for the center were immediately available from Google.
[FULL  STORY]

FABRICATED CHARGES?TAO  spokesman Ma Xiaoguang said Lee was being investigated ‘in accordance with the law,’ without giving details

Taipei Times
Date: Sep 12, 2019
By: Lee Hsin-fang, Chung Li-hua and William Hetherington  /  Staff reporters, with staff writer and CNA and AP

China’s Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) yesterday confirmed that 44-year-old Hsinchu native Morrison

Lee (李孟居), who had not been heard from since crossing from Hong Kong to China’s Shenzhen late last month, is under investigation on suspicion of engaging in criminal activity harmful to national security, as the Presidential Office and the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) demanded that Beijing give a full account of his detention.

TAO spokesman Ma Xiaoguang (馬曉光) told a briefing in Beijing that Lee was being investigated “in accordance with the law,” without giving further details.

Lee went missing on Aug. 20 after he sent photographs of Chinese paramilitary police amassing on the border between Shenzhen and Hong Kong to Fangliao Township (枋寮) Mayor Archer Chen (陳亞麟), who has said that he tried to call Lee later in the day, but could not get through.

Lee is an unpaid adviser to the township in Pingtung County and also serves on the board of the Taiwan United Nations Alliance. He had traveled to Hong Kong on Aug. 18 and headed to Shenzhen two days later on a business trip.    [FULL  STORY]

PRIVACY CONCERNS: The new ID cards would increase government monitoring of civilians, intrude on privacy and could endanger national security, rights groups said

Taipei Times
Date: Sep 11, 2019
By: Jason Pan  /  Staff reporter

The Taiwan Association for Human Rights (TAHR) and the Judicial Reform Foundation (JRF)

yesterday called on the Control Yuan to investigate a government plan to start issuing national electronic identification cards (eID) next year, saying they constitute invasion of privacy.

The Ministry of the Interior had pushed the eID scheme without any legal basis or assessing its impact on personal privacy, and keeping the public in the dark about the NT$3.3 billion (US$105.7 million) tender for the project, association secretary-general Chiu E-ling (邱伊翎) said.

The eID would become a tool for the government to track all aspects of people’s daily lives, spurring tighter control and pervasive monitoring of society, and undermining national security if eID data are hacked or leaked, Chiu said.

The ministry expects to start issuing the new ID, which has an embedded electronic chip for storing digital personal information, in October next year.    [FULL  STORY]

Radio Taiwan International
Date: 10 September, 2019
By: Paula Chao

A high-ranking US official has warned that China is spreading fake news in the run-up to the presidential elections in January.

US Deputy Assistant Secretary Scott Busby made the statement Tuesday in Taipei at an international workshop under the Global Cooperation and Training Framework (GCTF).

Busby accused China of trying to sabotage voting, divide the public and weaken Taiwan’s democracy by spreading fake news. He said they are doing this on various channels, including social media platforms.

"One of the best defenses, of course, against disinformation is a free and transparent media environment, which is why the US actively engages with our allies and partners to strengthen independent media," said Busby.     [FULL  STORY]

After Joshua Wong's visit to Taiwan, the DPP has taken no action to establish asylum measures to accommodate the young protesters in Hong Kong.

The News Lens
Date: 2019/09/10
By: Brian Hioe

The Democratic Progress Party (DPP) still made no moves to establish any formalized asylum measures in Taiwan despite last week's high-profile visit by key protest figures from Hong Kong including Joshua Wong, Lester Shum, and Eddie Chu.

The three met with DPP government officials and gave public speeches. During the visit — apart from thanking Taiwanese for their material support of the demonstrations in Hong Kong, as in contributions of gas masks and safety helmets — they also asked Taiwanese government officials to set up provisions for asylum seekers from Hong Kong.

However, after a meeting between Wong and DPP Secretary-General Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰), the administration responded that individuals seeking asylum in Taiwan will continue to be handled on a case-to-case basis.    [FULL  STORY]