Taiwan update

Ambassador Vincent Chin-Hsiang Yao has assumed the post as Representative of Taipei Mission in Sweden since July 2020.

Prior to his current post, Ambassador Yao was the Director General of the Department of North American Affairs, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of China (Taiwan), from December 2018 to July 2020. He was responsible for planning and implementing the policies regarding deepening and broadening Taiwan’s relations with the United States and Canada.

Mr. Yao was the Director General of Taipei Economic and Cultural Office (TECO) in Seattle from September 2016 to December 2018, during which Mr. Yao supervised TECO in Seattle’s work on broadening and deepening Taiwan’s diversified relations with the United States’ Northwest (Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming) and the State of Alaska.

Before his assignment in Seattle, Mr. Yao was Deputy Director General of the Department of North American Affairs of the Foreign Ministry of Taiwan.

Mr. Yao has been a Taiwan Foreign Service Officer since 1993. He first served in the Foreign Ministry as a North American Affairs officer. Then he was posted to Washington, D.C. for the first time in December 1997. He worked in Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office (TECRO) in the U.S. as a political officer for five and a half years. In July 2003, he returned to Taipei, where he was designated as Chief of Political Section of the Department of North American Affairs of the Foreign Ministry. Due to his hard work and remarkable performance, Mr. Yao was granted the 2005 Ministry of Foreign Affairs Outstanding Service Award.

In January 2007, Mr. Yao was promoted to Assistant Director General for North American Affairs and supervised dialogues and exchanges between Taiwan and the U.S. in political and economic fields.

Mr. Yao returned to TECRO in the U.S. in January 2008 and served as Deputy Political Director, in which he supervised TECRO’s communications with both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, major think tanks, foreign embassies and international organizations in Washington, D.C. area.

With his extensive experience in Taiwan-U.S. relationship, Mr. Yao returned to Taipei in mid-2013 and was soon recruited to the National Security Council (NSC) to serve as Senior Assistant to the Secretary General of the NSC. He left the NSC in April 2015 and was soon designated as Deputy Director General for North American Affairs, Foreign Ministry.

Born in Keelung City, Taiwan Mr. Yao was a lieutenant of the R.O.C. Marine Corps from 1989 to1991. He received his B.A. degree (1989) and M.A. degree (1994), in International Relations, from the National Cheng-chi University (Taiwan). He attended a diplomats’ training program at Oxford University (U.K.) from 1994 to 1995. He was a senior executive fellow at the Kennedy School of Government of Harvard University in 2005 and a senior fellow at the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies (APCSS) of the U.S. Pacific Command (PACOM) in 2014.