The central government will refrain from increasing the size of local governments to the extent that it would compromise the principle of streamlining their structure, the Central Personnel Administration (CPA) said in a press statement.
The Examination Yuan’s Ministry of Civil Services said on Thursday that the number of employees in local governments could be increased by 22,500 after Taipei County is upgraded to a municipality and the counties and cities of Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung are merged into municipalities at the end of next year.
In accordance with related regulations, a municipality with a population of more than 2 million is allowed to have a maximum of 15,400 employees, while the number of government staff is capped at 6,500 for a municipality with a population between 1.25 million and 2 million. Chou Chiu-ling (周秋玲), director of the Department of Laws and Regulations at the ministry, said that Taipei County would be allowed to increase its staff by 6,668, while the staff numbers could be increased in the merger of Taichung, Kaohsiung and Tainan by 9,439, 5,628, and 669 respectively.
All the counties and cities said in their proposals that they would not increase the number of staff by a large margin because they are all on a limited budget, Chou said. In the proposals, Taichung County and Taichung City wished to increase staff by 1,000 in the first stage. Tainan County and Tainan City said that the number of staff in a merged Tainan City would remain at the current level, as did Taipei County. Kaohsiung County and Kaohsiung City said they would hire more staff in a gradual manner, Chou said.
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
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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