Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) Chairwoman Lai Shin-yuan (賴幸媛) yesterday reiterated a government plan to open the country to individual Chinese tourists this year.
At a press conference, Lai said the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government and China have reached a consensus on allowing the entry of individual Chinese tourists to Taiwan, and the two sides are working on the details.
The MAC initially decided to limit the number of individual Chinese tourists to about one-tenth of the 4,000 daily cap.
Last year, up to 3,000 Chinese tourists were allowed to visit Taiwan daily, but both sides agreed to increase the quota to 4,000 this month. Lai declined to give a specific timeline on when the country would be opened to individual Chinese tourists, but said the policy would be carried out in the first half of the year.
Taiwan revoked a ban on -Chinese tourists two months after President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) took power in 2008, but only allowed them to visit in groups.
Lai said the Ma administration would continue to negotiate with China to deepen cross-strait exchanges under the framework of the Republic of China (ROC) Constitution.
Lai said the government’s China policy is based on the ROC Constitution, which is different from the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) “Resolution on Taiwan’s Future.”
The “Resolution on Taiwan’s Future” was written into the party charter to replace the “Taiwan Independence Clause” as part of the DPP’s preparations for the 2000 presidential election. Prior to 1999, the party’s stance on national identity was embodied in the 1991 “Taiwan Independence Clause,” which set as its goal the establishment of an independent country named the “Republic of Taiwan.”
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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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