Taiwan city planning a makeover says Trump agent showed interest
TAOYUAN, Taiwan —The fields are overgrown with weeds. Warehouses lie abandoned, their corrugated shells covered in rust. In the distance, an air base, where pilots once took off on reconnaissance missions over mainland China, is devoid of activity, its camouflaged hangars and guard towers symbols of a Cold War long over.
This neglected area just south of Taiwan’s biggest airport could use a complete makeover. And that is exactly what the local government has in mind. Described as the biggest development project in Taiwan’s history, the multibillion-dollar Taoyuan Aerotropolis promises, in a video with a saccharine violin and harp soundtrack, a futuristic utopia of eco-friendly homes and thousands of technology jobs.
Investors are welcome, and on Sept. 8, one arrived, a Taiwanese-American woman named Chen Siting, or Charlyne Chen. She claimed to represent a very prominent businessman: Donald Trump. She had been referred to the Taoyuan mayor by Annette Lu, a former vice president of Taiwan, the mayor’s office said in a statement on its website.
‘Isn’t he very busy?’
“I told them: Isn’t Mr. Trump campaigning for president? Isn’t he very busy?” the mayor, Cheng Wen-tsan, said in a television interview that aired on Nov. 18, referring to Chen’s group. “They said she is a company representative. His company is still continuing to look for the world’s best real estate projects, and they very much understand Taiwan.”
“She had authorization documents issued by the Trump company,” he said, without specifying.
The mayor’s office, in a Nov. 16 statement, said that although investment opportunities had been discussed, the meeting had not resulted in any agreement and that the election had not been talked about. The mayor’s office did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
On Friday, Amanda Miller, a spokeswoman for the Trump Organization, said that there were “no plans for expansion into Taiwan” and that there had been no “authorized visits” to Taiwan to push for a development project.
Asked on Sunday for clarification about the company’s relationship with Chen and knowledge of her activity in Taiwan, Miller did not respond to specific questions. She instead repeated in a statement that there had been “no authorized visits to Taiwan on behalf of our brand for the purposes of development, nor are there any active conversations.”
The Sept. 8 meeting, and its confirmation in November, went largely unnoticed outside Taiwan until Friday, when Trump, the president-elect, received a congratulatory phone call from the island’s president, Tsai Ingwen.
The call is believed to have been the first conversation between a Taiwanese leader and a U.S. president or president-elect in close to four decades, and it threatens to upend the delicate U.S.-China relationship because Beijing views any communication with Taiwan’s leaders as an affront to its claim of sovereignty over the island.
Complicates relationship
And even if it emerges that Chen was largely freelancing, and not acting on behalf of the Trump Organization, the perception of a possible business conflict in Taiwan further complicates the three-way relationship.
Possible conflicts of interest for Trump as president have been documented around the world, including in Scotland, India, Brazil, the Philippines, Argentina and Turkey.
But perhaps nowhere are the stakes quite as high as in Taiwan, because it involves ties between the United States and China, the countries with the world’s biggest economies and most powerful militaries.
“Even if the phone call had not happened, once these business dealings came to light it would send a very confusing signal to Beijing,” said Marc Lanteigne, a senior research fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs who focuses on Chinese security issues.