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News on China-Taiwan Relations

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Panama ditches diplomatic ties with Taiwan
Jun 16, 2017 (WiC 370)

Taiwan has endured “all kinds of humiliation” because of the island’s diplomatic ties with Panama, China Times reported this week. A Panamanian foreign minister once called up Taiwan’s ambassador at 3am, the Taipei-based newspaper said, ...

Mourning a master

Noodle king closes its Taiwanese business but says it’s no big deal
Jan 13, 2017 (WiC 351)

In China’s lingua franca, Putonghua, the term for instant noodles translates as “convenient noodles”. In Taiwan such phrasing might elicit a titter or two because local nuance conflates the word “convenient” with going to the ...

Targeting the tourists

Beijing turns the screw on Taiwan’s tourism trade
Sep 23, 2016 (WiC 340)

In January 2012 the Kuomintang’s Ma Ying-jeou won a second presidential term in Taiwan. Investors seemed happy to see closer economic ties across the Taiwan Strait too. Just a month before the KMT’s victory, Want Want China and Tingyi, two of ...

Strait talking demanded

Beijing wants Taiwan’s new president to clarify her stance on ‘1992 Consensus’
May 27, 2016 (WiC 326)

Tuan Tuan and Yuan Yuan arrived at Taipei’s zoo as gifts from mainland China in 2008, when Ma Ying-jeou had just become Taiwan’s president. The two pandas were named in tribute to tuanyuan – meaning reunion – an allusion to China’s ...

Business as usual?

Mainland reacts to Taiwan’s elections
Jan 22, 2016 (WiC 310)

The last time that Taiwan’s independence-minded Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) won a presidential election, it took an assassination attempt to swing the result. Hours before the 2004 election, DPP incumbent Chen Shui-bian was shot. The ...

A China sequel for Spielberg?

A film studio faces scrutiny – despite goodwill in Taipei over spy exchanges
Dec 11, 2015 (WiC 307)

In May 1960 an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union. The aircraft’s pilot was later allowed to return home in exchange for Rudolf Abel, a KGB agent captured by the US. The story will be familiar to those who have seen ...

Strait talking in Singapore

Historic meeting a litmus test for cross-Strait relations
Nov 13, 2015 (WiC 303)

In August 1945 Mao Zedong boarded a plane for the first time in his life. The Chinese Communist Party (CPC) leader was flying to China’s wartime capital in Chongqing to meet Chiang Kai-shek, the head of the nationalist Kuomintang ...

Every firm’s worst nightmare

How an online video caused havoc for noodle maker Master Kong
Aug 21, 2015 (WiC 292)

Where are China’s internet police when you need them? That must have been what executives inside food producer Master Kong were asking earlier this month when a potentially slanderous video accused them of including “gutter oil” in their ...

To the victor, the spoils

Who actually won the Second Sino-Japanese War?
Jul 17, 2015 (WiC 290)

Counting war casualties can be a politically-charged issue. That is particularly true in China, especially when it concerns the nation’s war with Japan that began in the 1930s. Regular readers will know that China’s TV studio produce a lot ...

Why McDonald’s is selling its Taiwan unit
Jul 10, 2015 (WiC 289)

In 1978, during a trip to Las Vegas, Taiwanese businessman David Sun tried McDonald’s for the first time. The experience was so exciting that the owner of Quanta Foods and his brother decided to buy the franchising right to open an outlet in ...

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