Citizens of China who are employed by international companies can in future be freely transferred to the companies' branches in Taiwan, following a Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) policy change that was announced yesterday.
"To help make Taiwan the center of the greater-China market, the policy revision will be a significant step to facilitate those international companies' personnel transfers and training in Taiwan," said Jeff Yang (楊家駿), the director of the MAC's Department of Legal Affairs.
Under the new policy, the government will grant three-year working visas to international companies' Chinese employees and their families, which would make Taiwan's treatment of Chinese nationals in Taiwan no different from that of other foreign professionals.
The companies would also be entitled to apply for extending their Chinese employees' working visas every year, for an unlimited number of years.
International companies welcomed the news.
"We welcome the new policy. Hiring should not be limited by a person's nationality, especially as many Chinese nationals are believed to be good additions to our teams," said TSMC spokesman Tzeng Jih-hao (曾智皓).
Yang added that the new policy was also necessary because of Taiwan's entrance into the WTO last October.
The WTO's General Agreement on Trade in Services states that the cross-border supply of services -- and also transactions involving the cross-border movement of capital and labor -- should be done without unnecessary restrictions.
Under the Statute Governing Relations between the People of Taiwan Area and Mainland Area (
International companies, how-ever, have had difficulties transferring Chinese employees to Taiwan under the regulation, which is widely considered to be an obstruction to Taiwan's further development.
Following Taiwan and China's entrance into the WTO last October, the MAC started revising its policies and regulations related to cross-strait trade exchanges.
The relaxed restrictions include the shortening of the the time needed to process applications by Chinese economic and trade professionals for visas -- from two months to five to ten days -- and extending high-tech professionals' maximum staying period from three years to six years.
The MAC also started issuing six-year multiple entry-and-exit visas to Chinese professionals who want to work in Taiwan.
Yang said that the MAC is proposing new and comprehensive measures to regulate the current cross-strait trade, and would submit these to the Executive Yuan soon.
The new measures would regulate economic exchanges among all kinds of industries more clearly, Yang said.
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
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
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