Mainland Affairs Council Minister Lai Shin-yuan (賴幸媛) yesterday came under fire over inconsistencies in her position on a development fund that became the focus of attention after it was revealed that a certain portion of the fund was given to Chinese students on a selective basis.
The Chinese Development Fund, a non-profit fund created by the council in 1994, was implemented in January 1996 to promote cross-strait relations.
The NT$30,000 (US$1,000) monthly subsidies, which are given to Chinese graduate students to study in Taiwan for up to two months, attracted attention recently after political talk show host Cheng Hung-yi (鄭弘儀) used expletives to describe the plan at a rally hosted by pro-localization groups last weekend.
Lai, who voted in favor of abolishing the fund when she was a Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) legislator, said the fund should continue to exist, as it was a good policy to subsidize Chinese students who could help China better understand Taiwan.
However, her position contradicted the council’s decision, which said on Monday that the government would terminate the program following the relaxation of cross-strait policy on education. Although universities will be allowed to recruit students from China starting next year, the administration has said it would not provide those students with subsidies or scholarships.
Lai told the legislature’s Internal Administration Committee she didn’t know much about the subsidy program when she was a TSU legislator and that she just voted according to the party line.
Once she learned more about its implications, she thought it was a good policy and that it should continue, she said, adding that the public had wrong ideas about the program and that “certain media outlets” had done their best to “defame it.”
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱) identified the “certain media outlets” as Sanlih E-Television (SET-TV), Formosa TV and the Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister paper), which she nicknamed “San-min-zi,” which sounds similar to the Chinese word for “sandwich.”
Lai said Taiwanese students also received government subsidies.
Statistics released by the council on Wednesday showed that the administration offered an average of NT$800 million in subsidies to Taiwanese students studying abroad and NT$600 million to Taiwanese graduate students every year.
During the budget review, the committee cut the fund by NT$1.6 million, including the NT$1.44 million earmarked for the Chinese student subsidy program next year. The committee also slashed the council’s budget by NT$2.775 million.
Despite the cuts, Lai vowed to forge ahead with the policies, which she said were “good and correct.”
Those policies included subsidizing Chinese artists and journalists, money for which does not come from the fund. Chinese journalists received subsidies of up to NT$120,000 a month to work in Taiwan.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods