Continuous neglect of regional development has led to the side effect of Chinese buying up high-end property in Greater Kaohsiung, a Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmaker said yesterday.
Chinese are taking advantage of falling housing prices in the Greater Kaohsiung area to purchase properties, DPP Legislator Chen Chi-mai (陳其邁) told a press conference, citing a report in the Chinese-language Wealth Magazine.
State-owned Chinese companies, including Sinosteel Corp, Bank of China and Bank of Communications, have begun negotiations to purchase commercial property in the nation’s second-largest city, the report said.
Housing prices and foreign investments in southern Taiwan have been plummeting since President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) took office in 2008, Chen said, adding that average real-estate prices in Greater Kaohsiung are a sixth of those in Taipei.
Because of the increasing gap in regional development between the north and south, it would be difficult to salvage the property market and investment climate in Greater Kaohsiung because it has become “a vicious cycle without solution,” Chen said.
Chinese firms have seized on this opportunity, he said, adding that it would take only NT$30 billion (US$1.02 billion) to purchase all the high-end property in Greater Kaohsiung.
While Taiwan has adopted regulations on Chinese investment since 2009 to avoid speculation, the Chinese companies have been using loopholes, such as dummy accounts, for the purchases, he said.
Chen said there might be a hidden agenda and political motivation behind a series of Chinese business deals in southern Taiwan, including the purchase of agricultural products, contracts with farmers and the purchases of property.
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