Premier Chang Chun-hsiung (張俊雄) yesterday urged his Cabinet to help the country achieve a GDP growth of 4.6 percent by the end of the year.
"This is our goal for this year. And it is my hope we can meet it," Chang said during the weekly Cabinet meeting.
Although the Cabinet's annual budget proposal is still pending at the legislature, the premier told Cabinet members to ensure that the more than 90 percent of the construction proposals that are legally funded continue anyway.
Cabinet members who fail to do so will have to make a detailed explanation during a Cabinet meeting.
"I want to make sure that my Cabinet members are doing their job and doing it well," Chang said. "I hope that the Cabinet's determination to enforce our policies and accomplish public construction ... will pressure the legislature to speed up the process to approve the budget proposal and give us the money we need."
He said that if the budget is not approved by next month, GDP growth could drop 0.3 percentage points and would fall 0.45 percentage points by the end of the year.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
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