Exclusive: President Lai Ching-te gives an inside look into tariff negotiations

Exclusive: President Lai Ching-te gives an inside look into tariff negotiations

2026-01-27

Now that Taiwan has secured a deal with the US to lower Taiwan’s tariff rate, President Lai Ching-te is touring various industries across the country to hear workers ‘and executives’ thoughts. FTV got exclusive permission to join him. President Lai revealed just how tough the nearly nine-months of negotiations with the US had been, and how his team needed to work day and night and often on weekends too, to get everything done. Now that the Taiwan-US tariff deal has been secured, it’s critical that opposition parties don’t block it in the legislature, he said. Let’s find out more.

President Lai Ching-te pays a personal visit to a major wrench manufacturer in Taichung. He is listening attentively to the concerns of executives and workers in traditional industries. Ever since the US launched a tariff war last April, Taiwan’s economy has faced significant challenges.

Lai Ching-te
President
Looking back on it, I realized that our work wasn’t just confined to daytime or nighttime hours. We worked on Saturdays and Sundays, and sometimes even in the afternoons we would go to the Presidential Residence to hold meetings with the relevant ministries. During these discussions at the residence, we would treat them to mangoes. That was summer. The talks went from summer into autumn, and from autumn into winter—it can truly be described as a long and drawn-out negotiation process.

This photo shows a typical scene at the Presidential Residence over the nearly nine months of negotiations. President Lai Ching-te personally chaired meetings. Also present were Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim and Premier Cho Jung-tai, as well as Vice Premier Cheng Li-chiun, and Minister without Portfolio Yang Chen-ni, who were in charge of the negotiations. Collectively they worked to resolve all the issues the US had raised.

Lai Ching-te
President
I would always convene a meeting before negotiations. Everyone would make decisions together. After they returned from talks, we would immediately hold an emergency meeting to resolve the issues. Whenever it’s daytime in the US, it’s nighttime in Taiwan, so we’d often keep an eye on the entire negotiation process until late in the night as we did not want the negotiation team to encounter difficulties and not be able to resolve them in a timely manner whenever the US raised issues.

Despite overall praise in industry circles for the results of the Taiwan-US tariff negotiations, the opposition KMT and TPP have continued to criticize them, raising concerns that the agreement could be blocked when it is submitted to the Legislative Yuan for review. President Lai has also repeatedly made earnest appeals for support.

Lai Ching-te
President
I hope the opposition parties will offer their support. I often say that even if you won’t do it for my sake, you should do it for the sake of the people. Our citizens and our industries are what matter most. Party competition is inevitable, but it should not descend into scorched-earth politics. If the results of negotiations are overturned yet again, it would deal a severe blow to the economy, and people’s livelihoods would inevitably be affected.

Whether the opposition dominated legislature agrees or not will affect not only people’s livelihoods, but the mutual trust between Taiwan and the US.

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#tariffs #taiwan #us #trade #international