Name: Taiwan Presidential Candidate Hou on China Ties
Uploaded: 2023-12-09T08:35:15.000Z
Duration: 4 min 8 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Is there going to be a war between Taiwan and China?

The Taiwan Strait must be stable and Taiwan must be safe.

So when you talk about dialogue and communication and this responsibility for the leader of Taiwan, I think about former President Ma Ying-jeou and how he met Xi Jinping in 2015.

If you were to become Taiwan's president, would you seek a meeting with Xi?

The most important thing at this stage is that we in Taiwan still have to stabilize this area in the Taiwan Strait.

Therefore, we must first improve our own national defense armaments and our own self-defense capabilities.

Of course, in the process of improvements, we will start with dialogue.

With the current situation ins Taiwan, in fact, we still have a long way to go.

One thing the US is obviously very concerned about is Taiwan's military commitments.

Ma Ying-jeou, the former president, cut Taiwan's defense spending when he was serving his term.

The situation at that time was completely different from the situation now.

At this stage, Taiwan is actually facing constant conflicts.

And it is easy to spark a conflict accidentally and trigger a war.

Therefore, under the current situation, the defense budget cannot be reduced.

If you spend the budget, it will only go up, not down.

Therefore, we need to continue to discuss with the United States how to improve Taiwan's self-defense capabilities and which weapons and equipments are most suitable for Taiwan in terms of the entire arms purchase.

When you increase the military budget, let's get specific here.

Will you commit to spending 3% of GDP on defense?

In fact, no matter how much GDP it is, the most important thing is to make the structure of the national defense budget meet the needs of all our operations.

One day, there may even be a chance to gradually increase it to 3% or above.

Of course that is what should be done to protect life and property at any cost.

With high GDP and high defense budget, this is not the issue.

The issue is that you have to use it in the right direction and it can really make the other party not dare to start a war easily.

You've made clear that as the future Taiwan President, your priorities are increasing Taiwan's military preparedness and also seeking dialogue negotiations with mainland China.

Taiwan's leaders should always remember one sentence. Preparation for war is necessary, but avoiding war is a leader's responsibility.

When the Democratic Progressive Party was in power, it broke the delicate equilibrium in Taiwan and brought that dynamic balance to the edge of conflicts and the imminent outbreak of war.

So we have to initiate exchanges with mainland scholars, experts and people.

It stabilized from non-governmental exchanges and gradually moved to official forms of exchanges.

Let the trust between each other continue to accumulate and increase again.

Let me tell you, it is impossible to return to Ma Ying-jeou's era in the short term.

If TSMC were to announce that they want to invest more in the United States, what would your response be?

Semiconductors are the lifeblood of our technology industry in Taiwan, and we must allow the advanced technologies to stay in Taiwan.

Mature technologies can be deployed globally.

We have to enact national security laws to protect the core and critical technologies in semiconductors and prevent confidential information from being leaked.