A leading Taiwanese businessman yesterday urged the president to make direct links with China a reality, saying a president shouldn't just speak without taking action.
Wang Yung-ching (王永慶), chairman of the Formosa Group, made the remark yesterday at a seminar on President Chen Shui-bian's (陳水扁) cross-strait policies over the past two years. The event was held by the National Policy Foundation, a KMT think tank.
Direct links between Taiwan and China would cover transportation, post and trade.
When asked to comment on Chen's speech on May 10, in which Chen said that opening direct links was unavoidable, Wang said, "President Chen, as the head of state, should credit his own words with real moves. If he postpones for too long, then people will question his credibility."
On May 10, during a trip to southern Taiwan with leading figures in the media, Chen made several proposals to improve cross-strait ties. Among these, Chen said the government would consider authorizing civil groups to negotiate with China on the issue of direct links.
Wang is particularly keen to open direct trade with China.
Should direct trade become possible across the Taiwan Strait, he said, Taiwanese raw-material suppliers could ship goods to China from Taiwan, instead of moving their operations to China.
"In that way, Taiwanese industries could stay at home and be more competitive."
Wang said the cost of shipping raw materials from Taiwan to China was about the same as transporting them from Kaohsiung to Taipei by truck.
He warned that if the government did not take action, within 10 years Taiwanese industries would lose their competitiveness and foreign firms would leave Taiwan."
He urged the government not to worry about the migration of manufacturing to China and to adopt a more open approach toward economic issues to ensure the long-term development of Taiwanese industries.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching