LAND-BASED: The Block II Harpoons can hit targets even in high waves, a perfect choice for the nation’s coastal defense needs, Sung Yu-ning said

Taipei Times
Date: Oct 28, 2020
By: Staff writer, with CNA

The proposed sale of a coastal defense missile system that the US approved on Monday would complement Taiwan’s anti-ship missile system and boost its asymmetrical warfare capabilities, local military experts said yesterday.

Washington on Monday said that it approved a possible sale to Taipei of up to 100 Harpoon coastal defense systems and related equipment for about US$2.37 billion.

It was the second time in a week that Washington announced an arms sale to Taiwan and the ninth arms sale announced by US President Donald Trump since he took office in January 2017.

Presidential Office spokesman Xavier Chang (張惇涵) said in a statement last week that the defensive weapons provided by the US help Taiwan “strengthen and modernize our national defense capabilities” and also increase “our asymmetric capabilities, making Taiwan more capable and confident of maintaining peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait and the region.”
[FULL  STORY]

Ambitious and experimental in structure, the story is centred around a daughter who comes to terms with the experiences of her parents and grandparents, who moved to America before she was born.

South China Morning Post
Date: 25 Oct, 2020
By: Aoife Cantrill

Bestiary by K-Ming Chang, One World.

Bestiary opens with a quest for lost gold. Agong, to whom the gold belongs, has no recollection of where he stashed the two bars. His family upturns the garden in pursuit of the misplaced treasure, first by digging holes, then with a metal detector. Agong’s two daughters run the machine over his sleeping body, thinking he might have ingested the gold and hidden it in his bowels, before they realise: “There’s nothing inside him we can spend, not unless grief is a currency.”

K-Ming Chang’s debut novel is structured around a set of myths, like this story of Agong’s lost gold, passed between Grandmother, Mother and Daughter. These stories tell their family history, allowing Daughter to come to grips with herself and the past traumas of her parents and grandparents who moved from Taiwan to America before she was born. There are hints of magical realism here – with an emphasis on the magical – as mystic events and spirits integrate seamlessly with Daughter’s reality. As the principal narrative voice comes from a child, this magic is taken at face value, an unquestionable part of the real.

In the novel’s main fable, a tiger spirit named Hu Gu Po eats children’s toes and longs to possess a human body. The spirit takes Daughter as its vessel, and she wakes up one day to find she has grown a tiger tail. The tail is arguably a metaphor for puberty, but Daughter remains oblivious to this, treating the new addition indiscriminately as a valid body part equal to a hand or a foot.
[FULL  STORY]

Some believe three colors stand for Taiwan’s DPP, KMT, and China’s CCP

Taiwan News
Date: 2020/10/25
By: Huang Tzu-ti, Taiwan News, Staff Writer

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — A Taiwanese academic’s poster work that emphasizes the virtue of “tolerance” among people of different viewpoints has been recognized at three international design competitions.

Titled “Tolerance (寬容),” the poster features two faces, one in green and the other in blue, kissing each other against a backdrop of red. The artwork seeks to convey the importance of showing respect towards people with conflicting views in a society embracing harmony.

Designed by Lin Chun-liang (林俊良), or Leo Lin, professor at the National Taiwan Normal University's (NTNU) Department of Design, it has received the Award of Excellence from California-based magazine Communication Arts, the Platinum Award from New York-based Graphis Design Annual 2021, and an honorable mention at the Ecuador Poster Bienal.

According to NTNU, CA’s Award of Excellence is dubbed “one of the most-coveted awards in the industry,” while the Graphis design competition is a prestigious contest that celebrates international talent in design. Lin created the poster at the invitation of New York-based artist Mirko Ilić, who is curating an international poster tour exhibition themed “Tolerance.”
[FULL  STORY]

Focus Taiwan
Date: 10/25/2020
By: Wang Cheng-chung and Joseph Yeh

Taipei, Oct. 25 (CNA) Former President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said Sunday that his party, the Kuomintang (KMT,國民黨), is holding a series of events to mark the 75th anniversary of Taiwan's retrocession to highlight the close links between the Republic of China and Taiwan.

The commemorative events have nothing to do with Beijing's "one-China principle" that sees Taiwan as part of the People's Republic of China (PRC), Ma said in a Facebook post.

Ma was responding to criticism by ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) spokeswoman Yen Juo-fang (顏若芳), who accused the KMT of using the occasion to play along with the Chinese government's "one-China principle" and its events commemorating the day.

According to the KMT, Taiwan officially returned to the domain of the Republic of China on Oct. 25, 1945, nearly two months after Japan surrendered at the end of World War II.
[FULL  STORY]

TAIPEI CONFERENCE: A Presbyterian pastor and Wuer Kaixi were among the speakers at a forum held by Taiwan Friends of Tibet and the Taiwan East Turkestan Association

Taipei Times
Date: Oct 26, 2020page3
By: Lu Yi-hsuan and Kayleigh Madjar / Staff reporter, with staff writer

Representatives of three of the world’s major religions and others attended a conference in Taipei yesterday to denounce religious persecution in China.

The event was organized by Taiwan Friends of Tibet and the Taiwan East Turkestan Association, and was attended by representatives of Christian churches, Tibetan Buddhists and Muslims, as well as followers of Falun Gong.

Attendees decried the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) rule a6s being directly opposed to religious faith and said that the opportunity to “take down the evil CCP has arrived.”

4The party has been attacking Christian groups ever since it took power, but has now turned monstrous, said Pastor Huang Chun-sheng (黃春生) of the Che-lam Presbyterian Church (濟南教會), which is next to the Legislative Yuan in Taipei.    [FULL  STORY]

• People’s Liberation Army tracked flight over Taipei on Wednesday ‘to ensure the operation did not have a malicious intent’, military insider says
• US and Taiwanese air forces had earlier denied any such flight ever happened

Sout China Morning Post
Date: 24 Oct, 2020
By: Kristin Huang

An American warplane was monitored by China’s military as it flew over northern Taiwan this week, according to a PLA source, despite the United States denying – after first acknowledging – that any such flight ever took place.

The incident began when two flight tracking services – Golf9 and Tokyo Radar – reported on Twitter on Wednesday that an aircraft with the serial number 62-4134 had flown through Taipei’s airspace at an altitude of 31,500 feet.

Although Taiwan’s air force dismissed the reports as fake news, the US Air Force on Wednesday confirmed that one of its RC-135W electronic surveillance planes had been in the area at the time of the reported sighting.

“I can confirm that an RC-135W aircraft did fly over the northern portion of Taiwan yesterday as part of a routine mission,” the US Pacific Air Forces’ public affairs department said in a statement published by military news website The War Zone.    [FULL  STORY]

Taiwan Insight
Date: 24 October 2020
By: Karl Chee-Leong Lee.

Organised by Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundation (TAEF), the recent Yushan Forum (October 18) in Taipei was the fourth of its kind since its inauguration in 2017. While the previous themes of the forums were on social and economic connectivity, regional prosperity as well as innovation of progress, this year it was resilience that took the theme of the distinguished forum. This is difficult to understand as the current COVID-19 pandemic has undoubtedly demonstrated how vulnerable countries and societies in the world are when responding to the unprecedented crisis individually or in a group. Without doubt, resilience has become an essential element every country should adopt, regardless of whether it is in the field of public health or economic development.

Furthermore, the Yushan Forum 2020 has invited policymakers, business figures and non-governmental organisation (NGO) leaders to explore ways to build partnerships and collaborations in the post-COVID-19 world. At the same time, it suggests innovative approaches to mitigate current challenges at the global stage. As highlighted in the Roundtable Dialogue session, the forum’s central vision is to forge a resilient future together with Taiwan as a contributory member within international society.

The ASEAN Context

Being a central focus in the Tsai administration’s New Southbound Policy (NSP), ASEAN stands to be the best ‘testing’ ground to gauge how effective the implementation of incoming resilient cooperation is and how it can be realised soon. First and foremost, most ASEAN countries require resilience-building following the COVID-19 pandemic that impacted their public health and economic development. While Taiwan has been providing many forms of assistance to individual ASEAN countries during the COVID-19 era, they do not necessarily conform to resilience-building in their vision of cooperation. As such, targeted cooperation with a focus on the principle of resilience regarding ASEAN countries is worthwhile for Taiwan to consider and implement in the post-pandemic period.

Second, relevant challenges and consequences of resilient cooperation with ASEAN countries can provide a clue to Taiwan. Such an approach can create realistic expectations and way forward for such an undertaking. As a region which has deep relations with China in the areas of trade, investment, socio-culture and politics, Beijing’s shadow looms large in Southeast Asia. As such, Beijing will likely obstruct any formal cooperation between Taiwan and ASEAN countries. Still, these challenges will be less for other NSP countries such as India and Australia. These countries currently have challenging relations with China while also recalibrating their foreign and security policies concerning Beijing. That said, ASEAN’s centrality and openness have allowed the region to possess deep partnerships with the Quadrilateral powers (US, Japan, Australia and India) as well as Taiwan. This is despite the island-state not being formally recognised by the Southeast Asian bloc.    [FULL  STORY]

85 percent of Taiwanese favor education reform to promote independent thinking

Taiwan News
Date: 2020/10/24
By: Ching-Tse Cheng, Taiwan News, Staff Writer

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Over half of Taiwanese believe that attending cram schools is essential for achieving academic success, according to a recent survey conducted by The Professor Huang Kun-huei Education Foundation (黃昆輝教授基金會).

The survey results, released Saturday (Oct. 24) by the non-governmental group, show that 53.3 percent of Taiwanese believe it is necessary for students to reinforce their education at cram schools after regular classes. In contrast, 37.7 percent of respondents said cram schools are not important to a student's success.

Nearly 43 percent of respondents indicated they would choose a high school for their children based on its college enrollment rate, while 49.6 percent said they would not. Close to 62 percent also disagreed with the statement that "higher education leads to better jobs" and only 34.8 percent agreed.

In regard to Taiwan's education climate, 85 percent of respondents are in favor of large-scale reform and a shift from an "exam-focused" approach to one that promotes "independent thinking." A total of 88 percent of Taiwanese also expressed support for the government to designate English as the official second language, while 9 percent opposed it.    [FULL  STORY]

Focus Taiwan
Date: 10/24/2.020
By: Hung Hsueh-kuang and Louis Liu

Taipei, Oct. 24 (CNA) Taiwan's Coast Guard Administration (CGA) has confirmed that five people have been rescued from a Tuvalu-registered freighter thought to have sunk in waters near Kaohsiung on Friday night, but the other five remain missing.

All the crew members are believed to be Thai citizens, according to a CGA statement Saturday.

The statement said that a distress signal from the Tuvalu-registered SEATRAN FERRY 12 was received around 10 p.m., and a tugboat reached the scene first to try to pull it to safety.

The tugboat succeeded in connecting a line to the ship, but the mission failed due to rough weather conditions.    [FULL  STORY]