Seeking to placate the grievances of ethnic minorities, the Cabinet decided late last night that it will not merge three agencies dealing with ethnic affairs into a single agency. The Mainland Affairs Council would be abolished with its businesses upgraded to a Cabinet-level entity.
"While mainland affairs require a higher administrative level because of its importance, we thought ethnic issues should be handled separately by different institutions," said Yeh Jiunn-rong (
Yeh made the remark in response to the recent outcry voiced by minority groups, including Aborigines, Hakkas, Mongolians and Tibetans.
They argued that absorbing the Council of Aboriginal Affairs, the Council of Hakka Affairs and the Council of Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs into a larger entity would be a step backwards in the government's ethnic policy.
Some public administration experts and academics invited by the commission to offer their professional opinions on the government restructuring plan have proposed to integrate the three commissions into one.
The Cabinet is required by the Standard Organic Law of Central Government Agencies (
The Cabinet is scheduled to approve the draft next Wednesday and send it to the legislature for further review. It hopes to see the draft passed into law by the end of the year and implement it on Jan. 1 next year.
The Standard Organic Law of Central Government Agencies limits the number of Cabinet ministries to 13, the number of commissions to four and independent institutions to five -- a total of 22 agencies.
The Cabinet had earlier proposed to reduce its 36 agencies to 26, including 15 ministries, six commissions and five independent institutions.
Under the Cabinet's new draft, five new ministries would be established on top of the eight particular ministries mandated by the Organic Law of the Executive Yuan.
The five new ministries would cover public health and social security, agriculture, culture and tourism, labor and human resources, and environmental resources.
The four commissions would include the present Hakka and Aboriginal councils, a new national development council and a maritime council. The Mainland Affairs Council would be upgraded to a Cabinet-level entity.
Independent entities
The five independent entities would be the Central Bank of China, the Central Election Commission and the Fair Trade Commission (unchanged) as well as a new financial supervisory board and a new national communications commission.
Government reform was one of President Chen Shui-bian's (
The Cabinet in April 2002 approved three draft bills that would facilitate the restructuring of the Cabinet.
The Standard Organic Law of Central Government Agencies provides a legal basis for the central government to establish independent institutions.
The Law Governing the Total Number of Civil Servants Employed by Central Government Agencies (中央政府機關總員額法) would set a ceiling for the total number of public servants working in the five branches of the central government, the Presidential Office, the National Security Council and the National Assembly at 200,500.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift