National Security Bureau (NSB) Director Tsai Der-sheng (蔡得勝) said yesterday that now is not an appropriate time for Li Hongzhi (李洪志), the founder of the Falun Gong spiritual movement, to visit Taiwan. Tsai cited national interest and security considerations while saying the government would not grant Li a visa if he were to apply for one.
A visit from Li would “damage cross-strait ties,” Tsai said in a Legislative Yuan committee meeting.
Falun Gong is banned in China. Beijing branded the spiritual group as an evil cult in 1999 and has since carried out a campaign to detain, re-educate and jail Falun Gong members. China has been accused of torturing, murdering and harvesting the organs of Falun Gong practitioners.
Li was born in Jilin Province and now lives in New York.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Tsai Huang-liang (蔡煌瑯) queried the NSC director on the matter during the legislative National Defense Committee meeting after a local newspaper reported last week that the DPP planned to invite Li to visit Taiwan. The party previously invited the Dalai Lama, who visited the island in late August to console Typhoon Morakot victims.
The DPP dismissed the report.
Asked whether the government was treating Falun Gong as an evil cult, director Tsai said it wasn’t.
Tsai Der-sheng also told legislators yesterday that during the 15 months since President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) took office, phone monitoring had decreased and that he would step down if the government’s wiretapping were proven illegal.
The director said that wiretapping for intelligence reasons had dropped 65.46 percent, while wiretapping in criminal investigations had decreased 56.99 percent.
Many legislators expressed skepticism, with some saying their phone calls had been monitored by the authorities.
Tsai Der-sheng’s comments followed a newspaper report last month that quoted an anonymous source at the monitoring unit of an intelligence agency as saying that wiretapping conducted by intelligence agencies had increased over the past year. Ma promised during his election campaign that there would be no more illegal wiretapping if he was elected, and reiterated his determination to end the practice of illegal eavesdropping during his inaugural speech.
Meanwhile, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislator Wu Yu-sheng (吳育昇) yesterday asked the Ministry of Justice’s Investigation Bureau to probe former president Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) comments about being an “agent” for the US government to determine whether Chen could be charged with treason.
Wu was referring to a comment by Roger Lin (林志昇), a member of the Taiwan Civil Rights Litigation Organization. Lin said Chen had declared himself an “agent” of the US government during his eight-year presidency and said the Republic of China government was in exile because the 1952 San Francisco Peace Treaty left Taiwan under the jurisdiction of the US military government. At the committee meeting, Investigation Bureau Director-胃eneral Wu Ying (吳瑛) agreed to form a task force to probe the “agent” claim for any violations of the law.
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