When 34-year-old Taipei resident Hsin Kuang-yi (邢光怡) quit her job last year to open a coffee shop in the city, instead of applying for a loan at a bank, she went to the Taipei City Government for help and received an interest-free loan of NT$1 million (US$340,000).
With the loan and NT$2 million in private capital, she and her business partner, Wu Yen-shuan (吳晏萱), opened a small coffee shop called “Coffer Coffee” in downtown Taipei seven months ago, becoming one of the 196 young entrepreneurs to take advantage of the city’s interest-free loan incentives to start their own businesses.
The zero-interest loan, one of Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin’s (郝龍斌) policies aimed at younger residents, is available for people between the ages of 20 and 40 who have started their own businesses. Those who receive the subsidy do not have to begin repaying the loan for three years.
Since the city government launched the zero-interest loan program in April last year, the city’s Department of Economic Development has given out NT$130 million to 196 Taipei residents, Commissioner Huang Chi-jui (黃啟瑞) said.
Hau yesterday touted the program as a great way to help young entrepreneurs achieve their dreams by giving them “their first bucket of gold,” and said the city government would expand the scope of the program this year.
“Taipei is willing to help young people settle down in the city and achieve their dreams. We are not worried about getting the money back because we’ve given loans to small and medium-sized businesses before and less than 3 percent of those companies had trouble repaying them,” he said yesterday during a visit to the coffee shop.
The city will extend the grace period of loan repayments from three years to five at the end of next month. In addition, the city will provide a rent subsidy to applicants starting their enterprise in August, subsidizing up to 50 percent of their rent for the next five years.
Hsin said the loan program would be a great help for younger business owners like herself and that she expected the city to offer more similar programs in the future.
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