A new round of negotiations that are a follow-up to the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA), which was signed in June last year, will be held in Taipei this week, the Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) said yesterday.
Chen Xing (陳星), director--general of the Department of Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao Affairs under the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, is scheduled to lead the Chinese delegation.
Taiwanese negotiators will be led by Bureau of Foreign Trade Director-General Bill Cho (卓士昭).
The delegates are expected to continue working group discussions on trade in goods and services.
The week-long talks will be the third round of discussions on the issue since ECFA negotiations were concluded.
During discussions, 5,824 items are to be reviewed in the goods section for tariff reductions, while more than 100 items are to be reviewed in the services sector, MOEA officials said.
Taiwan will make flat panels, finished automobiles, certain plastics and machine tools top priorities for tariff reductions in the talks.
Taiwan has been resistant to further opening its markets to Chinese agricultural products since signing the ECFA, which allows certain farm produce from China to enter Taiwan.
Nevertheless, Chinese Minister of Commerce Chen Deming (陳德銘) said recently that China hopes to sell agricultural products to Taiwan that are not produced in Taiwan or that are in short supply.
Meanwhile, negotiators from the two sides are putting the final touches on an investment protection agreement that has been discussed since late last year.
Both sides expect to reach an agreement during the next, or seventh, round of top-level talks between Taiwan and China, scheduled to take place in China’s centrally administered municipality of Tianjin next month.
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