Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Chen Ting-fei questions Minister of Education Wu Ching-ji in the legislature yesterday.
PHOTO: CHIEN JUNG-FONG, TAIPEI TIMES
Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) yesterday announced that after negotiations, Taipei and Beijing had agreed to cap the number of Taiwanese allowed to study in China every year at 2,000, sparking accusations that the regulation was a setback.
PHOTO: CHIEN JUNG-FONG, TAIPEI TIMES
Following the announcement, Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Kuan Bi-ling (管碧玲) called on the ministry to write regulations requiring that Taiwanese students intending to study in China apply at and register with the ministry. In response, the ministry said it would unveil its regulations on the matter next month.
Wu’s announcement, however, was not well received by the Taiwan Students Union, an organization of Taiwanese students in China, which called the regulation a “setback” in freedom, adding that the measure would unnecessarily limit exchanges between young people across the Taiwan Strait.
China announced in April that Taiwanese senior high school students who score within the top 12 percent in scholastic aptitude tests could now -apply directly to 123 universities in China and would only be required to pass an interview.
At present, Taiwan only recognizes the academic credentials of the top 41 universities in China.
In related developments, Minister of Education Wu Ching-ji (吳清基) said Chinese teams or personnel traveling to Taiwan on sports or academic exchanges should acknowledge Taiwan’s sovereignty and respect the national flag during their stay.
The minister’s remark came in the wake of an incident on Friday last week in which students at Kainan University in Taoyuan County decorated the campus with Republic of China (ROC) flags ahead of a match between China and Mongolia at the Asian University Basketball Championship.
The move is believed to have prompted the Chinese team to withdraw from the game.
The students said they had decided to bring in national flags to protest a request two days earlier by referee Lee Hung-chi (李鴻棋) that three Kainan students take down a large national flag during a game between Taiwan and China.
Wu Ching-ji yesterday said he disagreed with the manner in which Lee had handled the situation, adding that it was perfectly acceptable for students to express their patriotism.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY CNA
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