Two Chinese asylum seekers who have been stuck at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport for four months were allowed to enter Taiwan late on Wednesday.
Yan Kefen (顏克芬), 44, and Liu Xinglian (劉興聯), 64, entered Taiwan on the basis of “professional exchanges,” after they earlier that day exited the country by flying to an undisclosed location.
They were then picked up at the airport by friends and taken separately to prearranged accommodation. They now hope that the US or Canada will grant them asylum.
Photo: Tony Yao, Taipei Times
Yan and Liu on Sept. 27 last year arrived at the airport on a flight from Thailand and were scheduled to continue to Beijing, but did not get on the outbound flight.
They submitted a request for asylum on the grounds of political persecution in China, but could not provide any supporting evidence, the Mainland Affairs Council said.
The two were confined to a fourth-floor room at the airport.
Yan told the Central News Agency that life in the airport was “alright,” although he complained of stress and chest pain, as there was not enough room to move around.
“I haven’t slept in a real bed for a long time,” he said.
On Thursday last week, the council said that they could enter Taiwan on the basis of “professional exchanges” until they are granted asylum in a third nation, but would first have to exit and re-enter.
New School for Democracy board member Tseng Chien-yuan (曾建元) on Friday last week said that he was willing to act as guarantor for the two asylum seekers and that his decision was based solely on human rights considerations.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest foundry service provider, yesterday said that global semiconductor revenue is projected to hit US$1.5 trillion in 2030, after the figure exceeds US$1 trillion this year, as artificial intelligence (AI) demand boosts consumption of token and compute power. “We are still at the beginning of the AI revolution, but we already see a significant impact across the whole semiconductor ecosystem,” TSMC deputy cochief operating officer Kevin Zhang (張曉強) said at the company’s annual technology symposium in Hsinchu City. “It is fair to say that in the past decade, smartphones and other mobile devices were
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS