The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) yesterday questioned the effectiveness of an upcoming cross-strait forum on agricultural affairs to be jointly held by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Chinese government.
The forum is scheduled to be held in Fujian, China, on Tuesday and Wednesday.
The director of the DPP's Department of Chinese Affairs Lai I-chung (
Chinese farmers have been dumping products in the Tai-wanese market, but the safety and quality of these products cannot be guaranteed, he said.
As more and more Taiwanese farmers invest in agriculture in China, there is also a risk that Taiwan's agricultural technology may be "stolen" by Chinese farmers, he added.
DPP Legislator Wu Ming-ming (
He added that many Chinese manufacturers also pirate trademarks of Taiwanese products or add the word "Taiwan" to their product names to take advantage of the good image and reputation that Taiwanese products enjoy abroad.
Many consumers have been deceived by these fake trademarks or product names, he said, adding that the counterfeit items have gradually seized the market share of Taiwanese products in other countries such as Japan.
Wu told the media that about 30,000 cases of copyright violations have been put on hold in China, but he did not have detailed information as to how many of them were related to Taiwanese trademarks.
"If the forum is really being held to uphold Taiwanese people's interests, I hope the forum deals with the copyright issue first," he said.
Drawing on a survey done by the party's survey center on 1,018 people between Oct. 3 and Oct. 5, Lai said that close to 90 percent of respondents were worried about food safety as more and more Chinese agricultural products were being sold in Taiwan.
About 60 percent of respondents said they were worried that Taiwanese agricultural products may lose their edge in the global market as more and more Taiwan-ese investors transfer advanced agricultural technologies to China.
More than 60 percent of respondents said they did not believe that the forum between the KMT and the Chinese government could solve the fundamental problems relating to cross-strait agricultural exchange.
Lai added that only through "government-to-government" nego-tiations under the framework of the WTO could these problems be addressed.
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