Focus Taiwan
Date: 12/26/2020
By: Hsiao Po-yang and Matthew Mazzetta

From Wu Hsiao-chen's YouTube video[/caption] Taipei, Dec. 26 (CNA) A Taiwanese YouTuber raised ecological awareness — and many eyebrows — this week after releasing a video of him and his family using slingshots to shoot over 100 invasive green iguanas in central Changhua County.

In a video posted on Monday, Taichung-based YouTube personality Wu Hsiao-chen (吳小珍), his wife and two sons embark on a hunting trip through the farms fields and forests along Changhua's Erlin River.

Using only slingshots — which, as Wu notes, are not controlled items under Taiwanese law — the family shoot some 60-70 juvenile iguanas and 41 mature iguanas in the course of a day.

In the video, Wu reminds viewers who want to join the removal efforts to act humanely and to bury captured iguanas in small groups to avoid impacting the local environment.
[FULL  STORY]

CHECKING IT TWICE: All four people presented negative COVID-19 test results before boarding their flights, but all but one reported experiencing symptoms after arriving

Taipei Times
Date: Dec 26, 2020
By: Staff writer, with CNA

The Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) yesterday reported four imported cases of COVID-19, bringing the nation’s total to 780.

The new cases involve people arriving from Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines and the US, who all presented a negative COVID-19 test result issued within 72 hours of boarding their flight, the center said in a statement.

The case from the Philippines is a woman in her 30s who arrived in Taiwan to work on Dec. 10 and was quarantined at a government-designated center, the center said.

The woman on Wednesday was tested prior to leaving mandatory 14-day quarantine and the result came back positive yesterday, although she has so far shown no symptoms, it said.
[FULL  STORY]

Radio Taiwan International
Date: 24 December, 2020
By: John Van Trieste

Members of both the US House of Representatives and the US Senate have proposed resolutions backing a free trade agreement with Taiwan.

Both the House and Senate resolutions were introduced December 17. They say that trade and commerce can bring the US and Taiwan closer together and benefit both sides’ security and economic growth.

The resolutions say that the United States is Taiwan’s second-largest trade partner, while Taiwan is the United States’ tenth-largest trade partner and eleventh-largest economic partner overall. The resolutions say that the value of bilateral trade has growth from US$62 billion in 2010 to US$86 billion last year.    [FULL  STORY]

The Star
Date: Dec. 24, 2020
By: Jeremy NuttallVancouver Bureau

VANCOUVER — Taiwan’s success in battling online disinformation campaigns can yield lessons for other countries also struggling to counter false narratives and mistruths shared online, says the country’s digital minister.

Audrey Tang said disinformation campaigns meant to interfere with Taiwan’s democracy and society launched by mainland China have given Taiwan an edge in developing ways to counter such campaigns, methods other nations can implement.

“The importance, here, is that we are kind of in the front line,” Tang told the Star. “So, the more we share our counter-cyber security or counter-disinformation playbook, the more time other jurisdictions have in preparedness.”

Disinformation campaigns were in full swing in 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic spread and the United States held its presidential election. Since the Nov. 3 election, efforts attempting to discredit the validity of Democrat Joe Biden’s victory have emerged.    [FULL  STORY]

Reorganization to be completed by end of 2023: Ministry of National Defense

Taiwan News
Date: 2020/12/24
By: Matthew Strong, Taiwan News, Staff Writer

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — The Ministry of National Defense said Thursday (Dec. 24) it would add five coastal defense brigades by 2023 but denied reports that the change amounts to an expansion of the Armed Forces.

Media reports had claimed the measure was the first expansion of Taiwan's military since 1997, but the ministry said the move to establish five more brigades, bringing the total to 12, would only involve basic cadres, not any new staff, CNA reported.    [FULL  STORY]

Focus Taiwan
Date: .12/24/2020
By: Flor Wang and Lai Yen-si

Taipei, Dec. 24 (CNA) Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) confirmed on Thursday that high-profile Hong Kong film producer Charles Heung Wah-Keung (向華強) has applied to the National Immigration Agency (NIA) for a dependent alien resident card.

"Heung's application for residency is being handled by the NIA in line with the Regulations Governing Residency or Permanent Residency for People of the Hong Kong Area and the Macau Area," MAC spokesman Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) told a regular news briefing.

Heung and his son Jacky Heung (向佐) entered Taiwan in September for business reasons and their three-month stay can be extended for another three months, Chiu said.

It is understood the Heungs submitted their applications to the NIA during their current stay in Taiwan.    [FULL  STORY]

AN EATER’s CHOICE? The party has six months to submit a list of nearly 290,000 valid signatures, or 1.5 percent of the total electorate in the most recent presidential election

Taipei Times
Date: Dec 25, 2020
By: Sherry Hsiao / Staff reporter\

The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is on Jan. 6 to launch a nationwide signature drive to put the importation of US pork containing traces of ractopamine on the ballot, KMT caucus whip Lin Wei-chou (林為洲) said yesterday.

Lin is the lead proposer of a national referendum that would ask voters if they agree that the government should impose a complete ban on the importation of meat, offal and related products from pigs fed the controversial animal feed additive.

The KMT on Sept. 6 presented the referendum proposal at its National Congress in Taipei, after President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) announced on Aug. 28 the government’s decision to ease restrictions on the importation of US pork containing traces of ractopamine and beef from cattle aged 30 months or older.

The Central Election Commission (CEC) on Friday last week said that the proposal met the requirements of the first stage after satisfying a Nov. 25 request for clarification, and that it would ask household registration authorities to verify the list of proposers within 15 days.

Resposible Statecraft
Date: December 22, 2020
By: Chas Freeman

This article has been adapted from a lecture delivered to the Committee for the Republic.

Taiwan is an established American foreign policy success story that appears to be nearing the end of its shelf life. Management of the Taiwan question has long been the key to peace or war – possibly nuclear war – between the United States and China. Now, the door may be closing to peace. 

The essence of the Taiwan question is what political relationship should and can the two sides of the Taiwan Strait have with each other? This question is a legacy of the Chinese civil war, the Cold War, the strategically dictated rapprochement between Washington and Beijing, the U.S. habit of substituting military deterrence for diplomacy, and the American attraction to strategy-free, values-based foreign policy. Given the stakes for Americans, the question of how best to balance relations with Taiwan and the China mainland demands informed judgments and adroit statecraft. 

But the issue’s history is widely forgotten or misunderstood, and the dilemmas it presents get almost no attention. Americans seem to have achieved herd immunity to both situational awareness and strategic reasoning. The United States risks sleepwalking into a war with China it does not want and cannot now win. Such a war would likely end U.S. primacy in East Asia. It certainly would poison prospects for great power cooperation on planetwide problems.

Taiwan is an island a bit larger than Maryland but with four times the inhabitants. When it was seized by Japan in 1895, it was a province of Qing China. Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China recovered it from Japan in 1945. When Chiang lost the civil war in the rest of the country in 1949, he fled to Taiwan and moved the capital of his Chinese government from Nanjing to Taipei.     [FULL  STORY]

Focus Taiwan.
Date: 12/22/2020
By: Yeh Chen, Wang Shu-fen and Elizabeth Hsu1

aipei, Dec. 22 (CNA) An EVA Airways pilot from New Zealand, who was recently diagnosed with COVID-19, was fined NT$300,000 (US$10,649) Tuesday for failing to provide comprehensive information during the contact tracing process by Taiwan authorities.

The Department of Public Health in Taoyuan, the city where the pilot lives, said he had violated the Communicable Disease Control Act, after he tested positive for COVID-19 on Dec. 20.

When the pilot was asked to list the places he had visited and the people with whom he had come into contact since his most recent entry into Taiwan on Dec. 4, he "failed to provide detailed and accurate information," the department said in a statement.

Instead, he said he could not remember his movements after his three-day home quarantine period, which is the standard time for flight crews in Taiwan, and he did not mention that he had been in close contact with a Taiwanese woman Dec. 7-12, the department said.    [FULL  STORY]

DISEASE PREVENTION: While regulations for holding major events will not be changed, the CECC reminded local governments to have emergency response plans

Taipei Times
Date: Dec 23, 2020
By: Lee I-chia / Staff reporter

The Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) yesterday reported the nation’s first domestic case of COVID-19 since April, ending 253 consecutive days of no local transmission.

It also announced three imported cases from the Philippines.

The new local case — No. 771 — is a close contact of case No. 765, a New Zealander in his 60s, who is an EVA Airways Corp (長榮航空) pilot, said Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), who heads the center.

The center on Sunday said that the New Zealander might have transmitted the disease to two other pilots — case No. 760, a Taiwanese pilot in her 30s, and case No. 766, a Japanese pilot in his 20s — during a flight to the US on Dec. 12, as he was reported to be coughing on duty while not wearing a mask.   [FULL  STORY]