Taiwan will begin checking the human rights records of Chinese nationals seeking to visit the country, an official in charge of China policy said on Thursday.
The National Immigration Agency and other government agencies have formulated a procedure for screening applicants to prevent entry to Taiwan by Chinese citizens with a record of human rights abuses, Mainland Affairs Council Deputy Chairman Liu Te-shun (劉德勳) said.
Liu did not provide details.
The new procedure was developed in response to a request by the legislature’s Internal Administration Committee a month ago to take into consideration the “human rights records” of Chinese local government officials seeking to visit Taiwan.
The committee asked government agencies to research the human rights records of such applicants through the foreign and justice ministries, via the Internet and through consultations with groups that report human rights abuses.
The decision was announced against the backdrop of a cultural visit to Taiwan this week by Hunan Governor Xu Shousheng (徐守盛), whose human rights record has been questioned in the media. Before Xu left for Taiwan, it was reported that pro-democracy activist Li Wangyang (李旺陽) had died at a Hunan hospital under suspicious circumstances.
Li, 62, had been imprisoned for “instigating counter-revolutionary propaganda” after co-founding the Labor Autonomous Union to support student protesters in China in 1989. When Li was released in 2000, he sued for compensation, earning himself another lengthy sentence for the same crime.
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