In response to repeated calls from foreign businesspeople for the government to implement direct cross-strait links, the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday urged them to help bring Beijing to the negotiating table with Taipei.
Council Vice Chairman Chiu Tai-san (邱太三) said businesspeople focus on making money but tend to overlook the overall impact that launching direct links may have.
Chiu thanked the American Chamber of Commerce in Taipei (AmCham) and the European Chamber of Commerce in Taipei (ECCT) for their opinions on the three direct links -- transportation, trade and post -- but added the government had to consider the damage they may cause.
"Our government has done a lot of research to map out cross-strait policies. We are also working on supportive measures for these policies," Chiu said at a seminar entitled "Cross-strait Social Development" co-hosted by the council and National Taiwan University's Graduate Institute of National Development.
Chiu delivered the opening speech for the seminar on behalf of MAC Chairman Joseph Wu (吳釗燮). Two academics from Nanking were invited as speakers to the seminar.
"We hope AmCham and the ECCT can help us persuade Bei-jing to remove some of the barriers it set in the way of cross-strait talks ... The thing is that Taiwan alone cannot conduct negotiations with China even though it is already well prepared," Chiu said.
China also needs to work out details about how to reopen talks with Taiwan, the official said.
President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) said in his inaugural speech that Taiwan and China can promote trade and cultural exchanges, Chiu said, "but so far Beijing has not given us the kind of response that we expected."
However, Chiu said, Beijing has hinted that it wishes that the two sides can resume negotiations conducted by its semi-official Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits and its local counterpart, the Straits Exchange Foundation.
"That's why Chairman Wu, after talking to Premier Yu Shyi-kun, decided to invite ARATS Chairman Wang Daohan (
US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia James Kelly said on Wednesday that Taiwan and China are still a long away from negotiations. In response, Chiu said if it was difficult for governments on both sides to talk, they might authorize private organizations to conduct negotiations.
"President Chen hopes Taiwan and China can send envoys to each other's capitals so that they can communicate directly. That would reduce a lot of misunderstanding between us," Chiu 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
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