A member of the first Chinese tour group allowed to travel to Taipei via Kinmen disappeared from a Taipei hotel shortly after his arrival and remains at large, the Tourism Bureau said in a statement on Friday.
Lin Guobin (林國斌) arrived in Taipei on a flight from Kinmen on Sept. 30 — the inaugural day of the new cross-strait travel formula — after reaching the island on a ferry from Xiamen earlier that day along with a tour group.
As part of its efforts to attract more Chinese tourist arrivals, Taiwan began to allow Chinese holidaymakers to fly to Taiwan via Kinmen on Sept. 30.
Lin was nowhere to be found when the Chinese tour group leader conducted a roll call the following morning, the Tourism Bureau statement said.
He remained missing on the group’s scheduled departing date of Oct. 8, the statement said.
After an intensive search over the past 10 days failed to find the man, the National Immigration Agency put Lin on the “wanted” list on Friday, the statement said.
The statement said that the Tourism Bureau would deduct NT$200,000 from the travel agency’s NT$1 million deposit as a fine.
All local travel agencies intending to host Chinese tour groups are required to deposit NT$1 million as a guarantee.
Lin’s entry permit application form said he was a staff member at a ready-to-wear garment factory.
Travel sources said all members of the first tour group to travel to Taiwan via Kinmen had been carefully screened and selected.
It was difficult to understand why Lin, known as the boss of a garment factory in China, would abscond, sources said.
Oliver Yu (游芳來), Deputy Minister of Transportation and Communications, said attention must be paid to the motivations of those who have absconded and the frequency of such cases.
Since Taiwan began allowing more Chinese tourists on July 4, three absconding cases have been reported, including Lin’s case.
The other cases involved Chinese citizens traveling to Taiwan via a third location. On July 9, three Chinese women left their hotel without informing their group leader.
Two of them turned themselves in at a local police station later the following day, but the third one, identified as Guan Xiaoyin (關曉銀), remains at large.
On July 14, a man disappeared from his hotel after arriving with a tour group from a third location, but he was located the following day.
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