Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu (陳菊) said yesterday she remained optimistic that the Executive Yuan would approve the planned merger between Kaohsiung City and Kaohsiung County.
Asked for comment after a weekly meeting of the city government, Chen said the city’s competitiveness for the next 50 to 100 years would be seriously affected if the city and county were not merged into a special municipality while Taipei City and Taipei County were.
Chen conceded that the merger had met with strong opposition from a number of Kaohsiung City and Kaohsiung County councilors who were concerned that the number of councilor seats would be reduced.
However, the merger between the city and county is part of an “unavoidable trend,” Chen said, adding that she hoped to see more positive discussion of the matter.
Kaohsiung City Government had submitted a report on the merger to the Kaohsiung City Council after the Legislative Yuan on April 3 approved an amendment to the Local Government Act (地方制度法) to allow cities and counties to integrate into special municipalities.
The city government hopes to complete the merger by next year, simultaneously with the planned merger of Taichung City and Taichung County.
Meanwhile, 56 civic groups, including environmental protection groups, in Kaohsiung City and Kaohsiung County launched a campaign calling on the city and county councils to approve the merger by the end of next month.
“The central government has made it clear that it would deal with merger plans submitted by local governments by the end of next month,” said Lu Yu-yi (盧友義), an architect who organized the campaign.
Lu said many civic groups in Kaohsiung had been arguing for the merger for two decades and considered this campaign their “last battle.”
Tseng Tse-fong (曾梓峰), a professor at the Graduate Institute of Urban Development and Architecture of the National University of Kaohsiung, said city and county councilors should not put their political interests before the best interests of Kaohsiung residents when considering the merger.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods