The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) yesterday reiterated its call for the proposed cross-strait service trade agreement to be renegotiated and detailed its concern over the pact’s impact on certain sectors.
“We support and respect what our comrades are doing in the Legislative Yuan,” DPP Chairman Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) said at party headquarters, after DPP and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers scuffled in the legislature, pushing, shoving and grabbing microphones at the start of the legislative review of the agreement.
The DPP has always supported free-trade agreements — such as those with Singapore and New Zealand — that will benefit the economy and the party does not oppose the service trade agreement, Su said.
However, the party opposes agreements that lack transparency, and the government has failed to consult industries and companies that might be affected by the pact and to undertake a proper risk assessment of its impact, he said.
In a briefing to the DPP’s Central Standing Committee, Department of China Affairs director Honigmann Hong (洪財隆) presented a list of sectors that may be adversely affected by the agreement.
Citing a public opinion poll conducted by the party on Feb. 18 and Feb. 19, Hong said that 52 percent of respondents opposed the legislature passing the trade pact, while 70.5 percent supported a renegotiation of the agreement.
“We are standing on the same side as mainstream public opinion,” Hong said.
The DPP recommended that certain sectors, such as printing and publishing, advertising and logistics, should not be liberalized given the big difference in the countries’ political and economic systems.
Printing and publishing should not be open to China because Beijing maintains strict censorship and keeps a tight rein on freedom of speech, the party said.
Taiwanese logistics firms could be at risk as their Chinese counterparts are mainly state-owned enterprises that have huge financial capacity to buy up Taiwanese firms, Hong said.
Beauty parlors and laundromats — the source of livelihood for tens of thousands of small business owners — should also be exempted, he added.
Sectors that could raise national security concerns, including Type II telecommunications, Web site content management and database services, should also be excluded from the liberalization list, he said.
Hong added that liberalization as defined in the agreement was unequal, which he said could be a result either of the poor negotiating skills of President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration or China’s refusal to adopt reciprocal treatment.
China has limited its liberalization of electronic commerce, retail and funeral services to specific regions, while Taiwan places no restrictions on Chinese investment, Hong said.
China will also only allow Taiwanese nonprofit organizations to operate in the social care industry, while Chinese commercial and nonprofit organizations will be allowed to operate freely in Taiwan, he added.
The DPP does not oppose liberalization of the banking business, but warned that Chinese investors could become majority shareholders of half of the 16 financial holding companies in Taiwan, Hong said.
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