Beijing's invitation to local airline representatives to discuss cross-strait charter flights is a move geared toward bringing about unification with China, Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) chairman Joseph Wu (
Wu was responding to a fax that China's Civil Aviation Association executive director Pu Zhaozhou (浦照洲) had sent yesterday to the recently-elected Taipei Airlines Association (TAA) Chairman Tony Fan (范志強).
Pu oversees Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau affairs under Beijing's Civil Aviation Administration.
The fax congratulated Fan on his new post and urged him to lead a delegation to China to discuss the possibility of moving toward regularly scheduled cross-strait charter flights.
Pu said in the fax that he looked forward to a prompt reply.
While Beijing has expressed willingness to cooperate on increasing the frequency of cross-strait passenger flights, particularly over holidays and weekends, Taipei has been leaning more toward bringing about cross-strait cargo flights.
Taiwan recently rebuffed Beijing's proposal to operate cross-strait charter flights around Tomb Sweeping Day on Tuesday.
Fan said that he would not reply to Pu's fax immediately, as the TAA takes a passive role in cross-strait relations. He said that the TAA would wait for the government to issue instructions on the matter.
"There is no way I would do anything right now. The government hasn't authorized the association to do anything," Fan said yesterday.
"In any case, we wouldn't be able to meaningfully achieve anything without first securing government authorization," he said.
The government had supervised and authorized Fan's predecessor, former TAA chairman and Mandarin Airlines president Michael Lo (
The talks had led to the first non-stop cross-strait flights in over 50 years during the Lunar New Year holiday.
The MAC did not seem keen to proceed with discussions on cross-strait charter flights yesterday.
"There is currently no contact across the Strait, and Pu suddenly writes a letter to a non-governmental organization, one that has not been authorized by the government to negotiate," Wu said yesterday at the legislature.
"There is no way the council could agree to this against its principles," Wu said.
He said that in light of Beijing's moves to bring about unification, building domestic consensus among leaders of both the opposition and governing parties was the government's foremost task.
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