The Ministry of Education (MOE) yesterday said it opposed a Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) proposal to enshrine in law a series of restrictions aimed at Chinese students.
“Writing the restrictions into law could impede management at schools,” Vice Minister of Education Lin Tsung-ming (林聰明) said during a question-and-answer session with DPP Legislator Wong Chin-chu (翁金珠) at a meeting of the Education and Culture Committee.
“Schools should have room [to decide how they recruit Chinese students],” Lin said.
Lin’s remark make it uncertain how the legislature would finalize a number of proposed amendments aimed at bringing Chinese students to Taiwan.
The committee is scheduled to review amendments to the Act Governing Relations between Peoples of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (兩岸人民關係條例) and the University Act (大學法) next Monday, after the DPP caucus surprised many by saying on Monday that it would no longer block the ministry’s proposal to allow Taiwanese schools to accept Chinese students.
The move also means that Taiwanese universities could be enrolling Chinese students as early as the fall.
DPP Legislator Kuan Bi-ling (管碧玲) said the compromise came after members of the caucus realized they would be unable to block the ministry’s proposal from becoming law given the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) legislative majority.
However, the compromise came with conditions.
The DPP caucus said it wanted to enshrine “three restrictions and six noes” into law — arrangements that the ministry had previously proposed to protect Taiwanese students.
These would place limits on the schools and locations open to Chinese students as well as restrict the number of openings available each year.
The ministry promised to cap the annual number of Chinese students at 1 percent of the college entrance vacancies for a given year, but the DPP caucus proposed halving that to 0.5 percent.
The ministry also promised that Chinese students would be barred from receiving academic entrance bonuses or scholarships and prevented from taking part-time jobs, obtaining professional licenses and working in Taiwan after graduating.
Despite the compromise, DPP legislators on the committee continued to question whether allowing local schools to recruit students from China would help private universities, many of which are on the verge of closure.
Lin told Wong he agreed that accepting Chinese students was not a panacea for the problems facing education in Taiwan.
“Chinese students are not the only option. That’s why we encourage schools to recruit international students, overseas students of Taiwanese descent and Southeast Asian students,” Lin 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:
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