The government yesterday urged stores to refrain from replacing traditional Chinese characters with simplified characters in product descriptions or menus.
The call was issued against the backdrop of a new initiative allowing Chinese free independent travelers (FIT) to enter Taiwan.
“It’s not necessary to have product descriptions or menus available in simplified edition,” the Executive Yuan said in a press release, which did not ban the use of simplified characters outright.
One of the reasons Chinese tourists visit Taiwan is to experience the differences in culture, local traditions and customs between the people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, the statement said.
It said Chinese tourists can learn the beauty of traditional Chinese characters, adding that values and meanings inherent in the traditional form makes them better for interpreting Chinese culture than their simplified counterparts.
Elaborating on the government’s position, Government Information Office Minister Philip Yang (楊永明) said that keeping things as they are, including the use of traditional characters, would help Chinese tourists understand the real Taiwan.
It is the government’s position to promote the use of traditional Chinese characters, he said, referring to a government bid to gain UNESCO World Heritage status for traditional characters.
On Sunday, China National Tourism Administration (CNTA) Chairman Shao Qiwei (邵琪偉) announced for the first time that the program would start on June 28 and would initially be open to residents from select Chinese cities.
The public announcement of an exact launch date caught Taiwan by surprise. The government did not comment on it until Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) Deputy Minister Liu Te-shun (劉德勳) first indicated on Monday that work still needed to be done.
After the Democratic Progressive Party criticized what it referred to as China’s unilateral announcement of the start date for the FIT program, Liu yesterday said that the two sides had engaged in various negotiations on opening Taiwan to individual Chinese travelers, but some details of the program had yet to be confirmed.
Liu said the Travel Agent Association of ROC, Taiwan, and the CNTA were working on the legal and executive processes for the program. The Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) and its Chinese counterpart, the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait (ARATS), will then confirm the program and exchange paperwork before sending official documents to the Executive Yuan for approval.
“If everything goes well with the procedures, the program should be effective before June 28 and free Chinese travelers will be able to visit Taiwan immediately,” Liu said.
Officials from the SEF and ARATS declined to reveal the start date on Wednesday last week when they met in Taipei to discuss the effects of cross-strait agreements signed over the past three years.
Under the current framework for the program, a daily maximum of 500 independent Chinese tourists from Beijing, Shanghai and Xiamen will be allowed to enter the country.
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