Chinese tour groups could start arriving in Taiwan in May if unofficial talks with China go well, a newspaper said yesterday.
The Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times' sister newspaper) quoted an unnamed official as saying that Taipei and Beijing were expected to soon hold the final round of the unofficial talks on allowing Chinese tourists to visit Taiwan.
"Both sides are eager to finish the talks as soon as possible, so if everything goes smoothly, we could announce the decision in mid-April and mainland tourist groups will start arriving in Taiwan on May 1," the Liberty Times quoted the official as saying.
In 1987, Taiwan allowed its citizens to go to China for family reunions, sightseeing and business but continued to bar Chinese from visiting Taiwan for national security reasons.
The talks have dragged on for years but have failed to bear fruit because Beijing has refused to hold official talks with Taiwan.
China announced a new round of charter flights with Taiwan yesterday in an effort to temporarily skirt a ban on direct transportation links.
Eleven Chinese and Taiwanese carriers will fly 42 round trips through April 8 to coincide with the Tomb-sweeping Festival, China's official Xinhua news agency said yesterday.
Flights will service Taipei and Kaohsiung and Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Xiamen in China.
The flights were agreed to last year during negotiations between private aviation associations.
Direct charter flights have been gradually expanding to cater to the needs of Taiwanese residents in China, although they remain confined to major holidays, including the Lunar New Year holiday. The charters are off-limits to non-Taiwanese.
Taiwan's government is considering an expansion of charters to allow Chinese tourists to fly directly to the island, instead of by way of third countries as they are required to do so now.
Under pressure from the domestic tourist industry, Taiwan has been looking for ways to expand the number of Chinese tourists allowed to visit the country each year to 365,000, almost 10 times the current number.
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