A group of university presidents yesterday urged the legislature to complete legislation on a number of bills to allow Chinese students into Taiwan, on the eve of a joint legislative committee meeting to tackle a Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) proposal aimed at preventing these bills from moving into their second reading.
Haydn Chen (程海東), president of the Tunghai University and the Association of Private Universities and Colleges, urged lawmakers to deal with the DPP's proposal rationally and push the bills through as soon as possible.
“Allowing Taiwanese schools to recruit students from China lives up to the global trend. Taiwan needs to have vision and an open mind,” Chen said at a press conference hosted by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus.
National Chung Hsing University vice president Oliver Su (蘇玉龍) said local universities should promote international exchanges to be able to compete with schools in other countries.
A joint meeting between the legislature's Education and Culture Committee and the Internal Administration Committee completed the preliminary review of proposed amendments to the University Act (大學法), the Vocational School Act (專科學校法) and the Act Governing the Relations Between the Peoples of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (兩岸人民關係條例), although legislators did not reach consensus on any of the articles in the proposals.
The DPP would like to enshrine a series of restrictions proposed by the Ministry of Education in the law, banning police academies, military schools and medical schools from recruiting Chinese students.
The DPP also proposed banning Chinese students from working in Taiwan within five years after graduating from Taiwanese schools.
After the committees completed the review and referred the bills for further cross-party negotiation sessions — a necessary move before a bill can be put to a second reading — the DPP proposed that the committees reconsider the decision.
In accordance with legislative procedures, the two committees must hold another joint meeting to vote on the reconsideration motion before the proposed amendments can proceed to a second reading.
The motion has made it virtually impossible for local universities to start recruitment in September as the ministry hopes, because the proposed amendments are unlikely to clear the legislative floor before the legislature goes into recess on Tuesday.
The committees are scheduled to hold the vote today, with the KMT caucus resolved to mobilize its legislators to vote down the motion. DPP caucus whip Lee Chun-yee (李俊毅) threatened to mobilize caucus members to boycott the vote.
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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