Taiwan has snubbed China's plan to link up the two countries with a highway or a tunnel under the Taiwan Strait, urging Beijing to be "more practical" in improving cross-Strait ties.
"From the academic point of view, we can discuss this. But these `cross-Strait projects' are extremely difficult, costly and time-consuming," Mainland Affairs Council spokesman Johnnason Liu (劉德勳) told reporters on Tuesday.
Liu said that what separates Taiwan and China is not the Taiwan Strait, but the difference in the two sides' social systems and that only when China has adopted democracy can Taiwan and China be truly think about unification.
"The problem between Taiwan and China is not the sea or transport. It is system and values. The biggest obstacle is one has democracy and the other has dictatorship," he said.
"The two sides should discuss more practical issues, instead of wasting time on political propaganda," he added.
In recent years, China has floated the idea of extending its national highway network to Taiwan by building a dam and filling in the 120km-wide Taiwan Strait, or building a tunnel under the strait.
Taipei has dismissed the ideas as political propaganda and part of China's scheme to forcibly achieve China-Taiwan unification without the approval of Taiwan's people.
Kenting National Park service technician Yang Jien-fon (楊政峰) won a silver award in World Grand Prix Photography Awards Spring Season for his photograph of two male rat snakes intertwined in combat. Yang’s colleagues at Kenting National Park said he is a master of nature photography who has been held back by his job in civil service. The awards accept entries in all four seasons across six categories: architectural and urban photography, black-and-white and fine art photography, commercial and fashion photography, documentary and people photography, nature and experimental photography, and mobile photography. Awards are ranked according to scores and divided into platinum, gold and
More than half of the bamboo vipers captured in Tainan in the past few years were found in the city’s Sinhua District (新化), while other districts had smaller catches or none at all. Every year, Tainan captures about 6,000 snakes which have made their way into people’s homes. Of the six major venomous snakes in Taiwan, the cobra, the many-banded krait, the brown-spotted pit viper and the bamboo viper are the most frequently captured. The high concentration of bamboo vipers captured in Sinhua District is puzzling. Tainan Agriculture Bureau Forestry and Nature Conservation Division head Chu Chien-ming (朱健明) earlier this week said that the
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus yesterday said it opposes the introduction of migrant workers from India until a mechanism is in place to prevent workers from absconding. Minister of Labor Hung Sun-han (洪申翰) on Thursday told the Legislative Yuan that the first group of migrant workers from India could be introduced as early as this year, as part of a government program. The caucus’ opposition to the policy is based on the assessment that “the risk is too high,” KMT caucus secretary-general Lin Pei-hsiang (林沛祥) said. Taiwan has a serious and long-standing problem of migrant workers absconding from their contracts, indicating that
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