Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) Chairman Chiang Pin-kung (江丙坤) said yesterday that the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) had so far authorized the foundation to negotiate only one issue listed on the agenda for a third round of cross-strait talks.
Chiang said the MAC had authorized negotiations on joint efforts to combat crime, but that several other items were on the planned agenda.
The other issues are establishing a cooperative mechanism for banking supervision; cross-strait securities and futures market supervision; financial transactions; currency exchanges; double taxation; investment protection; and quarantine and inspection of agricultural products.
Although the MAC had agreed to let the SEF negotiate on combating crime, the council had yet to specify the content of the negotiations or approve a team of negotiators, Chiang said.
Setting a date for the third round of talks required both sides to first reach a consensus on the agenda, Chiang said, adding that he hoped the negotiations would take place in the first half of the year.
China made the remarks at a question-and-answer session after the foundation’s year-end press conference yesterday afternoon.
The administration of President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has said its cross-strait policy was to proceed gradually and tackle easier and more urgent economic issues before working on thornier, less pressing political questions.
But Beijing has indicated that it wants to address economic and political issues concurrently.
Chiang said yesterday that both sides had reached a consensus on dealing first with easier issues related to the economy and gradually moving toward more difficult and political ones.
Emphasizing that the ASEAN Plus Three forum — which consists of the ASEAN countries and Japan, South Korea and China — had put pressure on Taiwan, Chiang said a cross-strait economic cooperation agreement would be key to addressing the problem.
Chiang said the SEF had not yet received any instructions on negotiating political issues, including a truce and military confidence-building measures.
In related news, the Center for Prediction Markets at National Chengchi University yesterday said the number of Chinese visitors to Taiwan would likely be less than 20,000 this month.
Since a cross-strait agreement in June to increase the daily quota for Chinese tourists to 3,000, an average of 350 Chinese visitors have entered the country per day, it said.
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