The Taipei City Government will dispatch envoys to Beijing this week to convey its desire to allow a pair of China's giant pandas to be brought here, but the city first needs to gauge whether Chinese authorities are acting out of genuine friendliness in offering the animals, officials said yesterday.
City government spokesman Yang Hsiao-tung (羊曉東) told a news conference that a delegation would depart for Beijing today to discuss China's offer of a pair of giant pandas.
Giant pandas are listed as grade-one protected species by the Chinese government. There are only 1,590 pandas living in the wild. China has another 239 in captivity, with 27 living outside the country, on loan from the Chinese government.
After winning a landslide victory in Saturday's presidential election, president-elect Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said he would welcome a pair of pandas.
Beijing offered Taiwan a pair of pandas in 2005, while Ma was Taipei mayor, following former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairman Lien Chan's (
However opposition from pro-independence supporters who branded the offer a propaganda ploy scuttled the chances of the pandas coming to Taipei, with the administration of President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) eventually rejecting the offer.
The Council of Agriculture (COA) had also rejected the zoo's application for a permit to import the pandas, citing environmental concerns and misgivings about the zoo's ability to properly care for the endangered species.
The zoo then filed an appeal with the Administrative Court in Taipei, which is scheduled to deliver its verdict tomorrow.
Yang said that the zoo would deliver a revised import proposal to the council in a renewed bid to acquire the pandas.
Yang said that a three-story panda exhibition hall under construction at the zoo would be completed in June.
The facility is planned with the possibility that the pandas might breed. The hall is equipped with a panda nursery on the first floor.
The zoo has also planted bamboo -- the pandas' staple diet -- on six hectares in the zoo's park, and has dispatched a group of 20 zookeepers to the US for training on how to take care of pandas, Yang said.
"Taipei is ready" for the pandas, Yang said, adding that if the animals did come, the city government would launch panda-themed tour packages to attract more tourists.
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