The Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) does not have any immediate plan for — nor is it authorized to — discuss the establishment of an office in China or vice versa, SEF Chairman Chiang Pin-kung (江丙坤) said yesterday.
Chiang said the Act Governing Relations Between the Peoples of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (台灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例) stipulates that any Chinese non-profit body, corporation, organization or other institution must obtain permission from the relevant supervisory body in Taiwan if they want to establish an office or branch organization here.
So far, the SEF has not been authorized by the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) to discuss any such arrangement with its Chinese counterpart, the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait (ARATS), Chiang said.
As for setting up a new working panel of the cross-strait Economic Cooperation Committee (ECC), Chiang said the matter would be negotiated by the ECC.
The purpose of the ECC is to handle negotiation, implementation, application and interpretation of the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) or disputes arising from it.
The committee, which met for the first time in Taoyuan on Feb. 21 and Feb. 22, will initiate discussions on agreements on investment protection, commodity trade, service trade and a dispute resolution mechanism as stipulated in the ECFA.
Taiwan hopes to establish a working panel under the committee to address bilateral industrial collaboration to help Taiwan’s firms seize opportunities in the Chinese market before China launches its 12th Five-Year Plan in the second half of this year.
Regarding speculation that the next round of cross-strait talks between Chiang and ARATS Chairman Chen Yunlin (陳雲林) might take place in Taiwan, MAC Deputy Minister Liu Te-shun (劉德勳) yesterday said it was still too early to tell because the SEF and ARATS had not yet discussed the matter.
Liu added there was no timetable set for the return of 14 Taiwanese fraud suspects deported from the Philippines to China because investigations take time.
“We want not only the 14 suspects, but also evidence of their crimes,” Liu said.
However, this might not be easy to achieve because some of the suspects have complained that certain “equipment” connected to the crime was seized by Philippine officials.
Since Taipei and Beijing have signed an agreement on joint efforts to combat crime, Liu said he hoped both sides could sit down and talk about cross--border crime and how the two sides should deal with crimes committed in a third country.
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