The annual Lantern Festival will continue, but the central government is considering whether the festival should be hosted by the Tourism Bureau or by county governments, the bureau said in a statement on Saturday.
The Tourism Bureau said it had held the Lantern Festival for 20 years and that it was an important tourist attraction that had drawn a number of both domestic and international tourists.
This year’s Lantern Festival will be held in Ilan starting on Feb. 2. The bureau estimates it would draw approximately 5,000 foreign tourists.
However, the festival still has room for improvement in terms of content and scale, it said.
The bureau issued the statement following a China Times report that said the Ministry of Transportation and Communications (MOTC) was assessing whether the Tourism Bureau should continue hosting the annual event after this year.
The report also said that the bureau could decide to cancel the event after the evaluation.
The Chinese-language report quoted MOTC Minister Mao Chi-kuo (毛治國) as saying that after the government decided to change the event’s name from the “Taipei Lantern Festival” to the “Taiwan Lantern Festival” and change the venues of the festival every year, there have been complaints from some Japanese travel agencies that the changes made it difficult for them to arrange tour schedules.
Some travel agencies said they could not even put the festival on their schedules because the announcement of the new location comes too late.
“Given that local governments are also equipped with marketing resouces, there is a need for us to redefine the Lantern Festival,” the report quoted Mao as saying.
The military has spotted two Chinese warships operating in waters near Penghu County in the Taiwan Strait and sent its own naval and air forces to monitor the vessels, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) said. Beijing sends warships and warplanes into the waters and skies around Taiwan on an almost daily basis, drawing condemnation from Taipei. While the ministry offers daily updates on the locations of Chinese military aircraft, it only rarely gives details of where Chinese warships are operating, generally only when it detects aircraft carriers, as happened last week. A Chinese destroyer and a frigate entered waters to the southwest
A magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck off the coast of Yilan County at 8:39pm tonight, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said, with no immediate reports of damage or injuries. The epicenter was 38.7km east-northeast of Yilan County Hall at a focal depth of 98.3km, the CWA’s Seismological Center said. The quake’s maximum intensity, which gauges the actual physical effect of a seismic event, was a level 4 on Taiwan’s 7-tier intensity scale, the center said. That intensity level was recorded in Yilan County’s Nanao Township (南澳), Hsinchu County’s Guansi Township (關西), Nantou County’s Hehuanshan (合歡山) and Hualien County’s Yanliao (鹽寮). An intensity of 3 was
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s comment last year on Tokyo’s potential reaction to a Taiwan-China conflict has forced Beijing to rewrite its invasion plans, a retired Japanese general said. Takaichi told the Diet on Nov. 7 last year that a Chinese naval blockade or military attack on Taiwan could constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan, potentially allowing Tokyo to exercise its right to collective self-defense. Former Japan Ground Self-Defense Force general Kiyofumi Ogawa said in a recent speech that the remark has been interpreted as meaning Japan could intervene in the early stages of a Taiwan Strait conflict, undermining China’s previous assumptions
Instead of focusing solely on the threat of a full-scale military invasion, the US and its allies must prepare for a potential Chinese “quarantine” of Taiwan enforced through customs inspections, Stanford University Hoover fellow Eyck Freymann said in a Foreign Affairs article published on Wednesday. China could use various “gray zone” tactics in “reconfiguring the regional and ultimately the global economic order without a war,” said Freymann, who is also a nonresident research fellow at the US Naval War College. China might seize control of Taiwan’s links to the outside world by requiring all flights and ships entering or leaving Taiwan
RSS