Kinmen and Matsu residents should not blame slow economic growth on restrictions on the "small three links" between Taiwan and China, a senior cross-strait affairs official said yesterday.
Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) Vice Chairman Johnnason Liu (劉德勳) told a Central Broadcasting System (CBS) program that regulations on the links are only a minor part of the Statute Governing the Relations between the People of Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (兩岸人民關係條例).
Liu said the Regulation on Offshore Development (
The regulation underwent its largest-ever overhaul when the legislature passed amendments to it on Oct. 9. Yen Chien-fa (
They had planned to stage a demonstration in Taipei last Friday but later canceled the activity after negotiating with MAC officials. They held a public hearing in the legislature instead on the same day to urge the government to loosen restrictions on the "small three links."
"The `small three links' should not be directly associated with the islands' economic development. The islands' economic growth needs an overall plan," Liu said.
Direct transportation between Taiwan and China cannot be implemented if China is unwilling to negotiate about details of the plan, Liu said.
"Article 28 of the [cross-strait] statute has provided a sufficient legal foundation for direct transportation between Taiwan and China," he said.
"What truly blocks the progress of direct transportation is China's reluctance to negotiate with us. If they won't talk to us, direct transportation is impossible, even if we work out all supporting measures in 18 months," Liu said.
Liu said one of the goals of the amendment to the cross-strait law was to bridge the gap between cross-strait policies and reality.
"Over the past decade, the cross-strait situation has been changing fast," he said.
However, Liu said, the ups and downs in cross-strait relations have not slowed the cultural and social exchanges between the two sides. Many problems that the government could not foresee have emerged.
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
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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