A cross-strait meeting between the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is not helping resolve problems, but rather hampering the official negotiation process, a senior China policymaker said yesterday.
Mainland Affairs Council Vice Chairman Tung Chen-yuan (
"We hope Beijing doesn't avoid talking to the Taiwanese government because only government-to-government negotiations can resolve the problem," he said at one of the sessions organized by the Ketagalan Institute to discuss cross-strait trade and energy policies and the development of the energy industry.
Despite calls to allow more Chinese tourists to visit Taiwan, the head of the Council of Economic Planning and Development, Ho Mei-yueh (
If the government allows 1,000 Chinese tourists to visit Taiwan per day, and each tourist spends US$1,000 during the trip, the nation would earn US$36 billion per year, she said, adding that this represented only 0.1 percent of GDP.
"Allowing more Chinese tourists is not a panacea to the local economy," she said. "We must rely on ourselves. The service sector and manufacturing industry are the key."
The Taiwan Futures Exchange Chairman and former vice premier Wu Rong-i (吳榮義) echoed her statement.
"Allowing more Chinese tourists might help the economy a little, but what comes with it is a negative impact on society," he said. "We are not in a hurry to let more Chinese tourists come here and we don't need them to support us even if we are badly off."
In an afternoon session addressing the allocation of social resources and social welfare in a globalized world, former Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislator Chien Hsi-chieh proposed to cut the defense budget and instead improve social welfare.
Chien was a leading figure in the campaign led by former DPP chairman Shih Ming-teh (
He said the DPP's politics were center-left when it was founded and that one of its goals was to build a "Sweden in the East."
Building a state like Sweden requires high tax revenue, Chien said.
Chien said cutting military spending, making Taiwan relatively weak, would make China's military aggression look all the worse in the international community.
"Only by appealing to the common welfare can we unite the people," he said. "That is the best national defense."
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,