Five years after its implementation, the Tsai government’s flagship policy initiative aimed at boosting engagement with South and Southeast Asian countries has delivered some encouraging economic results. But observers say that to fulfill the policy’s goal of developing more comprehensive relations, a greater focus on people-to-people ties is needed. Taiwan’s Executive Yuan reported this September…
J. Michael Cole’s comprehensive new book describes the numerous and complex challenges facing Taiwan, as well as the Tsai Ing-wen administration’s measured, pragmatic approach to handling them. In Cross-Strait Relations Since 2016: The End of the Illusion, Taipei-based policy analyst J. Michael Cole provides readers with a nuanced account of President Tsai’s strategic approach to…
Part of President Tsai Ing-wen’s vision for the New Southbound Policy was for Taiwan to host an annual conference of thought leaders from the target countries to provide guidance regarding regional concerns and how the New Southbound Policy could best address them. Organizing the event – to be held each year on October 11 and…
Back in the 1950s and 1960s, when Taiwan needed support in the international community to hold onto its seat in the United Nations, one of its most effective means of winning friends abroad was through agriculture. Numerous teams of agricultural technicians were dispatched to developing countries, especially in Africa, to teach farmers techniques for increasing…
Western medicine was introduced to Taiwan a century and a half ago by foreign missionaries such as George Leslie Mackay, and American doctors in the 1970s and 1980s helped Taiwan develop a vaccine to overcome the scourge of hepatitis B. Now that Taiwan has built its own strong foundation in healthcare and public health, it…
In the first two-plus years of the New Southbound Policy, the number of students from the target countries enrolled in Taiwan’s colleges and universities increased by over one-third to reach 41,000. At the same time, more than 7,000 young Taiwanese per year head for the New Southbound countries either to take formal courses of study…
In addition to the New Southbound Policy, one of the central initiatives of the Tsai Ing-wen administration has been the “5+2 Innovative Industry” program focusing on cutting edge industrial sectors. The goal of forging links between those two policies was assigned to the Ministry of Economic Affairs as one of the five flagship projects under…
