The Executive Yuan's Veteran Affairs Commission (VAC) said yesterday that veterans who have given up their Republic of China citizenship, such as those who moved back to China before martial law was lifted in November 1987, are not eligible to receive a pension from the government.
The Liberty Times (the Taipei Times' sister paper) reported that a high-ranking government official said that when commission officials went to China in April to confirm the status of Taiwanese veterans, Chinese officials demanded that the Taiwanese government pay NT$13,000 a month to veterans who moved back to China during the martial law period.
The Chinese officials even threatened to report Taiwan to the International Red Cross for allegedly mistreating the veterans, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The Taiwanese officials refused and rejected the request on the spot, he said.
The commission's Regulations Governing Payments to Veterans Residing in China (就養榮民赴大陸地區長期居住就養給付發給辦法) says that veterans who relocated to China prior to the ban being lifted in 1987 broke the law and by doing so they have renounced their citizenships and thus are not eligible to receive any form of subsidy payment from the Taiwanese government.
The commission said the pension payments are not available to non-Taiwanese, People's Republic of China passport holders nor those who have a registered household in China.
Commission statistics show that currently there are almost 500,000 veterans and approximately 80,000 are eligible for the monthly payment.
The commission makes the payments every six months and regularly dispatches a number of personnel to China to report back on the status of the recipients.
It has been estimated that during the Martial Law era more than 6,000 veterans broke the law by moving back to China.
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