Focus Taiwan
Date: 09/30/2020
By: William Yen

Taipei, Sept. 30 (CNA) Taiwanese romantic comedy "My Missing Valentine" on Wednesday led the nominations for this year's Golden Horse Awards — the Chinese-speaking world's version of the Oscars — with a total of 11 nods.

The 119 minute color film, which follows a woman who wakes up one day to find out that Valentine's Day somehow mysteriously passed without her knowing, has been nominated for Best Narrative Feature, Best Director, Best Leading Actor and Best Leading Actress.

The movie was also nominated for Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Visual Effects, Best Art Direction, Best Original Film Song, Best Film Editing, and Best Sound Effects.

The plot follows the story of Xiao Chi, a quirky woman who is nearly 30 but has never had a romantic relationship.    [FULL  STORY]

‘ANOTHER LEVEL’: NDC Minister Kung Ming-hsin said the deal shows that Taiwan is more confident about making contributions to the international community

Taipei Times
Date: Oct 01, 2020
By: Jake Chung / Staff writer, with Bloomberg and CNA

Taiwan and the US are to collaborate on infrastructure funding in Asia and Latin America, which would boost Taiwan’s clout in the international community, Minister of Finance Su Jain-rong (蘇建榮) said yesterday.

The Framework to Strengthen Infrastructure, Finance and Market Cooperation, alongside the New Southbound Policy and the US’ Indo-Pacific strategy, would allow Taiwan to initiate dialogue with more friendly countries in the region, while allowing Taiwanese firms to branch out into regional debt markets, Su said.

The Ministry of Economic Affairs, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Transportation and Communications, and the Financial Supervisory Commission would be in charge of four task forces with direct access to the US, he said.

Taiwan has extensive business interactions with Southeast Asian countries such as Vietnam and Thailand, and nine of the remaining 15 countries that officially recognize its government are in Latin America or the Caribbean.    [FULL  STORY]

Radio Taiwan International
Date: 29 September, 2020
By: Shirley Lin

Defense minister Yen De-fa says there is no sign of a full scale war from China against Taiwan. Yen was responding to an inquiry from ruling Kuomintang Legislator Johnny Chiang at the Legislature on Tuesday. Chiang posed the question as there have been numerous military maneuvers from China causing tensions in the Taiwan Strait. 

Yen said the Taiwan military has always been ready for combat. He said China’s warplanes crossing the median line in the strait often occur during times of combat readiness. He said Taiwan’s national defense has established measures for dealing with any emergency.

Legislator Chiang asked whether the United States would sell offensive weapons to Taiwan. Yen said that the US and Taiwan are adjusting to  changes in the current cross-strait situation. He also said the US is also concerned about maintaining regional peace.    [FULL  STORY]

LawFare
Date: September 29, 2020
By: Raul "Pete" Pedrozo

A view of Taiwan's Kaohsiung Harbor, which faces the Taiwan Strait. (Flick/Formosa Wandering, https://flic.kr/p/9aCnHR; CC BY-NC 2.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/)

On Sept. 18 and 19, People’s Liberation Army combat aircraft on 40 occasions intentionally crossed the median line in the Taiwan Strait that separates mainland China from the island of Taiwan. Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen immediately condemned the provocation as a “threat of force.”

The center line in the Taiwan Strait (also known as the median line, middle line or Davis Line, named after Brig. Gen. Benjamin Davis, commander of Task Force 13 in Taipei and famed commander of the World War II Tuskegee Airmen) has its origins in the 1954 U.S.-Taiwan Mutual Defense Treaty. The treaty was one link in the chain of U.S. collective defense arrangements in the Western Pacific—which included agreements with the Republic of the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and the Republic of Korea—designed to resist further communist subversive activities directed against their territorial integrity and political stability. Pursuant to Article V of the Mutual Defense Treaty, an armed attack in the treaty area, which included Taiwan and the Pescadores (or Penghu) Islands, directed against the territory of either party would be considered a danger “to its own peace and safety” and each party “would act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes.” An addendum to the treaty established a buffer zone into which U.S. aircraft were not allowed to enter.

The airspace that encompasses the center line in the Taiwan Strait is international airspace, and so all nations, including China, may exercise high seas freedom of overflight in this area. China is therefore not legally prohibited from crossing the line. However, even though China does not officially recognize the existence of the de facto center line, there has been a tacit understanding on both sides of the strait to respect the unofficial boundary. Since the line was established in 1954, there have been only four reported Chinese military incursions across the line. The first intrusion occurred in July 1999, in response to then-Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui’s declaration that a state-to-state relationship existed between Taiwan and China. In July 2011, two Sukhoi Su-27 fighters briefly crossed the center line when they attempted to intercept a U.S. U-2 reconnaissance plane over the Taiwan Strait. A third incursion occurred in April 2019, when two Chinese Shenyang J-11 fighters crossed the buffer and came within 115 miles of Taiwan before being intercepted by Taiwanese fighters. Then in August 2020, two Chinese air force fighters crossed the center line to protest U.S. Health Secretary Alex Azar’s visit to Taipei, the highest-level U.S. official visit to Taiwan since 1979.   [FULL  STORY]

49% of Taiwanese confident in own military's ability to defend against Chinese attack

Taiwan News
Date: 2020/09/29
By: Keoni Everington, Taiwan News, Staff Writer

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — As China continues to menace Taiwan with aggressive military actions, a new poll released on Monday (Sept. 28) shows that 60 percent of Taiwanese believe that the U.S. would send troops to defend Taiwan.

The latest poll by the Taiwan Public Opinion Foundation (TPOF, 台灣民意基金會), which was released at a press conference on Monday, found that 60 percent of Taiwanese adults over the age of 20 believe that if China used force against Taiwan, the U.S. may send troops to defend the country, with 33 percent disagreeing. TPOF Chairman You Ying-lung (游盈隆) said that this finding shows that the vast majority of Taiwanese believe at this moment that if China uses force to invade Taiwan, the U.S. military may step in to defend Taiwan.

Specifically, poll recipients were asked the following question: "If China used force against Taiwan, do you think the U.S. would send troops to help [defend] Taiwan?" In response, 24.1 percent chose "very likely"; 35.9 percent selected "it is possible"; 20 percent opted for "unlikely"; 13.4 percent checked "impossible"; and 6.6 percent did not have an opinion, did not comment, or refused to answer the question.

You said that this shows the change in the psychological state of the Taiwanese people in response to the recent wave of U.S. policy changes towards Taiwan.    [FULL  STORY]

Focus Taiwan
Date: 09/29/2020
By: Chang Ming-hsuan, Yu Hsiao-han and Elizabeth Hsu

Taipei, Sept. 29 (CNA) Nine popular restaurants in several cities and counties across Taiwan have been caught violating food safety regulations, a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) official said Tuesday.

Some were using expired ingredients and others were found to have been cooking dishes using vegetables contaminated with excessive pesticide residue, the official said.

The findings were brought to light during the agency's April-July inspection checks of 164 restaurants, some of which are located in tourist attractions and some are popular restaurants that are highly evaluated on the internet, FDA specialist Chen Mei-chuan (陳美娟) said.

The examination of restaurant foods was launched as the COVID-19 pandemic has kept people on the island from traveling abroad due to border controls, who have therefore turned to domestic travel and local gourmet food purveyors, Chen said.

A total of nine restaurants failed the extensive checks, according to Chen, including the Sushiro Taipei Zhonghua Restaurant, which was found to have served a crab and shrimp salad dish below sanitation standards.{FULL  STORY]

NO SIGN OF WAR: Only if Taiwanese showed determination to defend the nation would others be willing to help in the event of a Chinese attack, the premier said

Taipei Times
Date: Sep 30, 2020
By: Jake Chung / Staff writer, with CNA

Should China launch a war against Taiwan, the military would fight to the last standing person, Minister of National Defense Yen De-fa (嚴德發) said yesterday, adding that the nation has fully fleshed-out defense strategies.

“Beijing has continued its acts of provocation against Taiwan, but there are currently no signs that it is ready to launch a full-scale war,” Yen said at the Legislative Yuan in Taipei.

Asked how long Taiwan could withstand an attack from China, Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) said: “Taiwan will not fall.”

Minister of National Defense Yen De-fa, left, accompanied by Premier Su Tseng-chang, comments on US arms sales to Taiwan during a question-and-answer session at the Legislative Yuan in Taipei yesterday.

Photo: CNA

Any belligerent force that initiates acts of war would pay a heavy price, and so too would Beijing, he said.  [FULL  STORY]

MIDNIGHT RESEARCH: The autonomous shuttle service would take 15 passengers, who must register ahead of time for a short trip on Xinyi Road

Taipei Times
Date: Sep 27, 2020
By: Staff writer, with CNA

Taipei residents starting on Wednesday next week can ride a driverless bus during a midnight trial service on Xinyi Road, officials said yesterday.

Passengers must first register for one of six sections, ranging from 1 to 1.7km, on a route between Taipei 101 and Hangzhou S Road, Department of Information Technology official Wu Chien-ni (吳茜妮) said.

One ride is to be offered each night, and would depart from Taipei 101 at 12:30am and head west toward the intersection of Xinyi and Hangzhou roads before turning toward the intersection of Xinyi and Guangfu roads at 2:15am, Wu said.

Each ride would take about 15 minutes, and the 6m long vehicle, operated by Turing Drive Co, can hold 34 passengers, but only 15 would be permitted during the trial service, she said, adding that registration details would be disclosed tomorrow.    [FULL  STORY]

Radio Taiwan International
Date: 26 September, 2020
By: John Van Trieste

The “Search for Your Second Mother” project, headed by Radio Taiwan International and sponsored by some 30 civic groups, has taken on a new mission. It is helping a Taiwanese family track down an Indonesian caregiver whom they have lost touch with for 17 years. That’s after RTI successfully helped a Taiwanese woman find her long-lost Vietnamese nanny in July.

The Liao family in the central city of Taichung hired the Indonesian worker named Wati to care for their one-year-old boy in 2000. They spent nearly three years together before she left Taiwan in 2003.    [FULL  STORY]

Now is the time for sober minds in Washington, Beijing, and Taipei to assert themselves.

The Natiopnal Interest
Date: September 26, 2020
By: David M. Lampton

The probability of war, or something like it, is growing in the Taiwan Strait. The effects of such conflict would not remain geographically or functionally confined. Convinced of its power and its righteousness, Beijing is preparing for this eventuality, fearful that prospects for a “peaceful reunification” with the island are slipping from its grasp. For its part, Washington, persuaded it must defend a fellow democracy and its own role as the leading power, also is taking steps to prepare. The United States and China are sleepwalking toward conflict. If not the current Trump administration, then the next administration in Washington likely will be tested severely in the Taiwan Strait and more broadly in the region. In terms of an historic parallel to this moment, Think Pacific, 1940–1941, a circumstance in which American moves to deter imperial Japan through embargo and other means arguably hastened the initiation of conflict.

The Dynamic

Events, like a river, build as they move downstream, gaining volume, force, and destructive power as successive tributaries dump into the main channel. As these tributaries feed into the ever-swelling current of Sino-American relations, what was once a manageable flow progressively is becoming alarmingly less so. Though we cannot forecast precisely when and where a breach of the river’s containment structures will occur, once it does everyone will be able to explain why and how it occurred. Five major tributaries are feeding into the increasingly turbulent torrent of Sino-American relations:

Tributary One: The Erosion of the One China Policy. The United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have gone from mutually irritating, but at least minimally shared norms with respect to the management of cross-Strait relations, to very few shared norms and understandings with respect to Taiwan. We see this in current trends with respect to: U.S. weapons transfers to the island; what “unofficial ties” between Washington and Taipei entail; increasingly worrisome Sino-American military shadowboxing in the vicinity of the Taiwan Strait and the East and South China seas; and in Beijing exerting its rapidly tightening control of Hong Kong as a template for how it might handle a coercive takeover of Taiwan. All this is occurring as the overall U.S.-China relationship is becoming more ideologically freighted, increasingly framed in America as a struggle between democracy and tyranny (the “surveillance state”), and in the PRC as a fight for a “rejuvenated China’s rightful place in the world” that Washington seeks to obstruct.    FULL  STORY]