National Police Agency Director-General Wang Cho-chiun (王卓鈞) flew to Beijing yesterday, making him the highest-ranking Taiwanese police officer ever to visit China, officials said.
Wang and his 16-member delegation were to meet Chinese Public Security Minister Meng Jianzhu (孟建柱).
The delegation’s visit follows Chinese Vice Minister of Public Security Chen Zhimin’s (陳智敏) secret — at the time — visit to Taiwan from Sept. 13 to Sept. 18.
PHOTO: CNA
Wang will also visit Shanghai as well as Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces before returning home on Tuesday.
“The purpose of the visit is to ramp up cooperation on ways to battle crime on both sides,” the National Police Agency (NPA) said in a statement.
In April last year, Taiwan and China forged an agreement on judicial cooperation and joint efforts to beat crime.
The NPA said that since the signing of the agreement, police on the two sides of the Taiwan Strait have arrested 1,254 people from the other side on fraud charges, although the Ministry of Justice’s -statistics show China has only repatriated one fugitive, while Taiwan has submitted 165 requests for such repatriation
A ministry official was quoted by the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister paper) as saying that although Taiwanese authorities have provided their Chinese counterparts with Taiwan’s most-wanted list, China does not seek out the individuals on the list, but only informs Taipei when Chinese police apprehend suspects who happen to be on the list, in which case these people may then be repatriated.
As of June, only one fugitive had been repatriated from China, although he was not a white-collar criminal on the most-wanted list, the official told the newspaper.
The official said that both sides also disagree on jurisdiction.
Since Taiwan does not recognize China’s criminal jurisdiction, a Taiwanese fugitive who was sentenced by China’s courts would face a new trial after being repatriated.
Beijing hopes that Taiwan would recognize Chinese court rulings and allow Taiwanese convicted in China to serve their prison terms in Taiwan on the basis of the Chinese court sentences, the official said.
Because this has yet to happen, Beijing has been reluctant to repatriate Taiwanese fugitives convicted in Chinese courts, the official said.
Taiwanese can file complaints with the Tourism Administration to report travel agencies if their activities caused termination of a person’s citizenship, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said yesterday, after a podcaster highlighted a case in which a person’s citizenship was canceled for receiving a single-use Chinese passport to enter Russia. The council is aware of incidents in which people who signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of Russia were told they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, Chiu told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Taipei. However, the travel agencies actually applied
Japanese footwear brand Onitsuka Tiger today issued a public apology and said it has suspended an employee amid allegations that the staff member discriminated against a Vietnamese customer at its Taipei 101 store. Posting on the social media platform Threads yesterday, a user said that an employee at the store said that “those shoes are very expensive” when her friend, who is a migrant worker from Vietnam, asked for assistance. The employee then ignored her until she asked again, to which she replied: "We don't have a size 37." The post had amassed nearly 26,000 likes and 916 comments as of this
New measures aimed at making Taiwan more attractive to foreign professionals came into effect this month, the National Development Council said yesterday. Among the changes, international students at Taiwanese universities would be able to work in Taiwan without a work permit in the two years after they graduate, explainer materials provided by the council said. In addition, foreign nationals who graduated from one of the world’s top 200 universities within the past five years can also apply for a two-year open work permit. Previously, those graduates would have needed to apply for a work permit using point-based criteria or have a Taiwanese company
The Shilin District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday indicted two Taiwanese and issued a wanted notice for Pete Liu (劉作虎), founder of Shenzhen-based smartphone manufacturer OnePlus Technology Co (萬普拉斯科技), for allegedly contravening 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) by poaching 70 engineers in Taiwan. Liu allegedly traveled to Taiwan at the end of 2014 and met with a Taiwanese man surnamed Lin (林) to discuss establishing a mobile software research and development (R&D) team in Taiwan, prosecutors said. Without approval from the government, Lin, following Liu’s instructions, recruited more than 70 software
RSS