All right
Welcome to a first trial test of the dot TW report
Now today originally we were going to record Current Affairs Taiwan, but Michael Turtin couldn't make it today
And so I thought I'd test this out and give it a run now if this works out
Well the idea is to do about a ten minute or so report a few times a week
Now it will be a little bit different than say an ICRT report
Which of course covers all the news in a very quick format. This is focused entirely on politics and foreign affairs
Things like that, and it's a little bit more about why certain things
jumped out or are important so the idea is to give a little bit of context and a little bit of
So you can get a little bit more of a sense of what goes into
Our thinking when we do current affairs Taiwan on Sunday evenings, I'm sorry Monday
Now all of this content you can follow on our website
tiled the Taiwan report website which is report dot
TW (Report.tw) so, you can check it out
You can check out all these articles you can
Double check and you know follow up and get a little bit more depth than content if you like
Alright, so I'm gonna start with some of the sillier news from today
The this is a Taiwan News report, which I pulled some there's actually a longer more in-depth
CNA one that came out later
But I went with the Taiwan news one because they tend to be the fastest and they were in this case
Now the this is a Chinese promoters
There's a YouTube video video put up by Potter King
now this is pretty funny because he got Tsai Ing-wen to show up there at their studio and
he decided to flirt with the
President Tsai Ing-wen so the video was titled first person in the world
to flirt with a president that was posted up on Saturday and
It was I saw little bits of it on on the TV news and it looked like it was funny and kind of cute
Tsai kind of dealt with it very well. You know, she bantered with them and it was a little bit of fun
however
China which has
providing them with some funding
Company in China Chinese promoter I should say
asked them to delete the video because it said
They use the term president
Now Potter King has said there's absolutely no way that they will do so and they will not
They will basically the money isn't that important to them
So let's move on
All right, this is the love Ferris wheel now if you remember if you remember going way back
During the campaign for Kaohsiung mayor Han Kuo-yu came up with several ideas
some of which were not
Exactly realistic this one however, technically probably could happen
now the idea was is that there would be a very large ferris wheel looking over the Love River and
But instead of just like a little normal like your normal ferris wheel
Each of the carriages would essentially be a like a little love motel room. So
That people could be like a little hotel
And then there would be a shopping complex. Now. It turned out that they didn't really have a good site for this
near the Love River but what they did have is some other areas around however as
the Taipei Times reported not a single investor has expressed an interest in
Developing the old port zone at the port of Kaohsiung
one of the locations considered by the Kaohsiung city government to implement its love ferris wheel and
shopping mall project
Now
the
The mayor then went on and blamed them
So the sorry, let's see here the city accused of not cooperating
This is the ports company in implementing the project and threatened to raise the percentage of funds
It would receive from the development of pier 21 from 42 to 50 percent, you know in order to put the screws on
No, that's not the only person that Mayor Han Kuo-yu blamed he also blamed Lin Chia-lung
saying that and then here's some headlines from local Chinese language sources our
transportation Bureau blocking love Motel ferris wheel Lin Chia-lung spits back
excuse and in Fount media because of the
quote love motel ferris wheel hand slams
Transportation Bureau Lin Chia-lung Don't pass the buck to others because political promised check
bounced
Alright there's some polling, you know, which I didn't see in the English press so I put together something here for you on
Report.TW
local Taiwan media poll shows Su Tseng-chang's
Cabinet hits new highs and Langella long sweeps the top spots
So according to a Taiwan Brain Trust Poll
the executive UN cabinet headed by Su Tseng-chang has hit a new high in popularity with
48.7% expressing satisfaction and
35.5%
dissatisfied now of his various ministers Lin Chia-lung and his Ministry of Transportation
Came out tops in all three categories polled public visibility
45.7 so people know who he is their satisfaction with him at forty nine point three and Ministry of Transportation
That's his department. The satisfaction was fourteen point seven, which put it ahead of every other of
Every other one mostly people don't really know what they think of most of these
ministries or the details
All right, here's a quick one, I'm gonna go over Focus Taiwan
Taiwan US companies to ink pact on f-16 maintenance center
alright, so this is important because
Now this is here. Let's take a look at this Taiwan's state-owned Aerospace Industrial Development Corp
AIDC and US defense contractor Lockheed Martin Corp are to sign a strategic partnership agreement
Tuesday to promote the establishment of an F-16 fighter jet maintenance center in Taiwan according to AIDC
No this may I'm not a defense analyst so I'm not really sure but this seems to me like this would be a good way
both to get engineers in Taiwan AIDC up to speed on
certain parts maintenance
And so on and so forth on
F-16 but in fighter jets in general this also may be a way that the US
May be helping to funnel some technology to a AIDC. Now AIDC is developing
They're the ones who did the previous
the indigenous fighters and
They are working right now on building a new set of trainer jets
For the Taiwan Air Force now, I don't know for sure if there's gonna be any technology transfer, but it's definitely a possibility
and of course because you know the United States would get a lot of objections from China if they openly did a
Technology transfer this may be a very subtle way of going about it
now, it's going to be set up in the Shalu District of
Taichung there's another remote possibility that comes from this and that is that if there's an emergency with an F-16
the
U.S. F-16 and they're in the area they could land at Taichung CCK Airport Air Force Base and then
This would be just nearby
So, all right. Those are just a few that I've picked out for today. I've got some more coming tomorrow, which I'll go over
But very quickly before I go take a look
the the report is linked to here on our site the
the Committee to Protect
Journalists has come out with a very long report
Called one country one sensor how China undermines media freedom in Hong Kong and Taiwan
Take a look at it. I may go into it a little bit tomorrow
but for
Now you have access to the whole thing
But just very quickly here take a look at some of the things here Taiwan faces a dilemma
how does it maintain its openness and press freedom while facing an adversary that has vast resources and
Technological prowess and lacks the values that have made Taiwan a democracy
based on CPG reporting Taiwan does not have a clear answer as
This report documents China's influence over local local legacy and social media has grown
That influence has become potentially more worrisome as general elections on January 11th, 2020 approach
Reflecting fears that China is intervening surreptitiously
To sway the outcome
Now facing potential threats Taiwan has employed a patchwork of legal and regulatory
Approaches to punish media for inaccurate reporting or distortions while experimenting with other methods of fighting lies with truth
Anyway, the report goes into considerable depth talks a lot about the Want Want Group and so on and so forth
But I think I'm gonna leave it there. We've hit the ten-minute mark, so hopefully you'll get more of these in future