The Legislative Yuan’s Education and Culture Committee meeting on Wednesday looks set to face a firestorm of protest as it reviews two controversial bills that will allow Chinese students to study in Taiwan and give recognition to Chinese educational credentials.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator and committee chairperson Chao Li-yun (趙麗雲) said the committee “must do something” during Wednesday’s meeting because of its failure to review the bills despite four earlier meetings.
Minister of Education Wu Ching-chi (吳清基) has also expressed concern about the need to push through the bills as soon as possible, she said.
The proposed amendment to the University Act (大學法) and another amendment to the Vocational School Act (專科學校法) were included in the committee’s agenda on Friday night.
Review of the bills has been stalled because of a boycott by Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislators.
SEPTEMBER
At present, Taiwan does not recognize Chinese diplomas or allow local schools to recruit students from China. The KMT administration would like to relax the restrictions by the next academic year, meaning next September.
The number of Chinese students allowed to come to Taiwan for study would be capped at 1 percent of student vacancies at local colleges and universities if the necessary bills are passed by the legislature.
Wu, Vice Minister Lin Tsung-ming (林聰明) and Mainland Affairs Council Vice Minister Chao Chien-ming (趙建民) last month visited Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) and lawmakers to solicit support for the proposed bills.
Chao said it was reasonable to include the bills on Wednesday’s agenda because the Ministry of Education has already held 21 public hearings on the issue across the nation at the request of the committee.
“We should not refrain from dealing with the bills just because some people have different opinions about them,” Chao said.
DPP MOBILIZATION
The DPP caucus has threatened to mobilize its legislators to stop the committee meeting from going ahead.
DPP Legislator Kuan Bi-ling (管碧玲) criticized the KMT-dominated committee for including the bills on the committee’s agenda at a time when most legislators were occupied by the review of the draft Industrial Innovation Act (產業創新條例) on Friday.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
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