The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) will soon establish criteria to assess applications by Chinese banks planning to open branches in Taiwan after a financial accord with China comes into effect in the middle of next month, commission Vice Chairwoman Lee Jih-chu (李紀珠) said yesterday.
Lee made the comment at a seminar in Taipei, where the Beijing-based Agricultural Bank of China (中國農民銀行) expressed an interest in opening branches in Taipei.
Chinese banks wishing to open branches in Taiwan will have to be examined, she said, adding that the recent global financial crisis had exposed many defects in the cross-strait financial supervisory systems.
Lee said the commission was in the process of revising those regulations.
Agricultural Bank of China vice president Yang Kun (楊琨) told reporters yesterday that while the bank intends to open a branch in Taiwan, it has yet to consider acquiring shares in Taiwanese banks because he was not familiar with Taiwan’s regulations.
Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) last week told media that for the moment, Taiwanese financial institutions would not be opened to Chinese investment.
The Agricultural Bank yesterday launched a new debit card tailor-made for customers shopping on credit in Taiwan, which could serve as a stepping stone for deeper financial cooperation with local banks.
The bank is working together with China UnionPay (中國銀聯) in issuing the debit cards to meet demand by a growing number of Chinese tourists. Chinese people are only allowed to take 20,000 yuan (US$2,930) on their visits to Taiwan.
The launch of the debit card represents “the beginning of cross-strait cooperation and will facilitate increased collaboration,” Yang told another press briefing, without elaborating.
The bank’s clients began using the debit cards in August and have spent more than 300 million yuan in Taiwan, China UnionPay said.
The number of Chinese tourists nearly tripled to 766,026 in the first 10 months of this year, compared with last year’s 258,852, making up more than 21 percent of the total of 3.53 million tourists to Taiwan, the latest statistics by the Tourism Bureau showed.
The bank’s debit card holders can shop at more than 6,000 stores across Taiwan.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
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New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last