Taiwan is experiencing strong growth in its air transportation sector, with a 22.9 percent increase in passenger volume at Taoyuan International Airport between January and March compared with the same period last year, according to the Ministry of Transportation and Communications (MOTC).
Minister of Transportation and Communications Mao Chi-kuo (毛治國) said passenger volume at Taoyuan International Airport had been growing since August last year.
Between January and March this year passenger volume topped 5.55 million, not including passengers in transit, he added.
While Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport deals with far fewer passengers than international airports in Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Bangkok and Tokyo, it outstripped them all in terms of growth in passenger volume.
The number of passengers arriving at Taoyuan Airport is expected to top 24 million this year, Mao said.
Mao said there was solid growth in air cargo volume. At 409,000 tonnes over the same period this amounted to growth of 71 percent, once again the highest in the region.
Meanwhile, the Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA) announced that total passenger volume at Taiwan’s international airports topped 6.5 million people from January to March, a 22.61 percent increase on the same period last year.
A close look at the CAA’s statistics showed that passengers on cross-strait flights accounted for 10.9 percent of the growth, whereas those on other international flights contributed 11.62 percent.
Mao said these statistics emphasized the extent to which the launch of a cross-strait flight service had helped to reinforce Taiwan’s status as an important transport hub in the Asia-Pacific region.
“Free trade zones near the airport and seaports have transformed themselves into value-added service centers, where manufacturers can bring their parts to Taiwan, assemble them, repackage the product and export to other nations,” he 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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