Pan-blue draft amendments to the Statute Governing Relations between the Peoples of the Taiwan Area and Mainland Area (
Long a flashpoint between ruling and opposition party lawmakers, the statute governs a sweeping array of cross-strait links, from trade, investment and tourism to immigration.
A separate pan-blue draft amendment to the statute seeking to lift restrictions on the transfer of sensitive technologies from Taiwan to China, sparked a near brawl in the legislature last Friday, as pan-green lawmakers forced the Home and Nations Committee to adjourn prematurely.
Faced with equally controversial amendments yesterday, pan-green lawmakers again engaged their opposition colleagues in bickering so intense that the committee was forced to adjourn in the morning despite what was scheduled to be an all-day meeting on Chinese immigration.
"This is a bill by the Chinese for the Chinese!" shouted Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Huang Chien-huei (黃劍輝).
Sponsored by 50 pan-blue lawmakers, an amendment to Article 70 of the statute drafted by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Diane Lee (
Lee's bill would fast-track Chinese immigrants' residency applications over other immigrants, whose application for residency can require up to eight years, critics said.
KMT Legislator John Wu (
Sponsored by 34 pan-blue lawmakers, the proposed amendment would pave the way for Chinese immigrants to become civil servants immediately after obtaining permanent residency.
If passed, pan-green lawmakers said, the bills would allow Chinese to be employed by the government within just five years of arriving.
Mainland Affairs Council Chairman Chen Ming-tong (
There are now 290,000 Chinese spouses in the country.
The National Security Bureau (NSB) has other concerns about the proposals. Senior bureau officials worry that the bills could lead to an influx of Chinese spies eager to gain employment in a wide array of government agencies, an anonymous official was quoted as saying in the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times' sister newspaper) yesterday.
In April, the US weekly Defense News quoted former vice minister of defense Lin Chong-pin (林中斌) as saying that more than 5,000 spies are now in Taiwan.
NSB Deputy Secretary-General Wang Hsi-tien (
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
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
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