Monday, March 27, 2006

NSC Points Taiwan to India

I've long been an advocate of closer Taiwan-India relations, and stuff like this just warms the cockles of my heart:

With India's increasing influence in the South Asian region, Taiwan might want to extend its "go south" policy to include that country and seek more economic and political cooperation with the developing economy, a top official at the National Security Council (NSC) said yesterday.

"The world is observing the warming relations between the US and India, especially the most recent US-India nuclear agreement, which US President George W. Bush hopes the US Congress will endorse despite the fact that India has not signed the UN's nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty," council Deputy Secretary-General Parris Chang (張旭成) said.

"India sees China as its biggest threat in the region and its alignment with the US reflects a change of course in its foreign policy," he said.


2 comments:

Kerim Friedman said...

This has already helped me. I get to present a paper about Indian indigenous people at this year's Taiwan International Studies Association meeting in Taipei (in November). Maybe it will even help our film...

Anonymous said...

I wish we could only get some popular media coverage of the rest of Asia. I have yet to have a college class that would not argue with me that India will soon surpass China in population. Just totally give up asking what country is the biggest democracy (for some reason the UK seems to be a common answer) and don't even think of asking about some other countries in the area like the largest Muslim country that is also the third largest democracy in the world.

Taiwan media, and even educators, are still stuck in the Western modernist mode of thinking. As I've told Michael before, my business students, for a marketing simulation, once created a box into which Indians were to climb so they could be disinfected. And these students were from top schools around Taiwan in a national competition. Neither they nor the other judges (all business rich kids owning daddy's business) had a clue why I was losing control!