Several Vietnamese workers in Taiwan voiced concern over the violent anti-China protests in their home country last week and called on their compatriots to exercise restraint.
The Vietnamese workers told the Central News Agency that since the protests in Vietnam erupted earlier last week, they have been trying to tell their friends via social media that Taiwan is different from China and that patriotism should not be about violence, but wisdom.
Vietnamese protesters vandalized and set fire to scores of factories in the southern province of Binh Duong in protest against a Chinese oil-drilling venture in an area of the South China Sea that Hanoi regards as within its exclusive economic zone.
“I really don’t know what else I can do... I feel terrible and very sad because Taiwanese are all very friendly and nice,” said Le Thi-phuong, a 32-year-old domestic caregiver who has been working in Taipei for 10 years.
She added that she feels sorry for the Taiwanese businesspeople in Vietnam who have suffered lossesas a result of the rioting.
One of Le’s friends, Ng Thi-hoa, who also works as a caregiver, said that she was deeply saddened by the incidents.
“Vietnam has finally seen some peace and prosperity recently, but now the riots are scaring all foreign investment away,” Ng said, adding that she has not been sleeping well since the unrest started.
The Vietnamese workers said they had been closely following the latest developments in their home country and hope their government will take immediate steps to restore order.
They also said they hope the incidents will not affect the good ties between Taiwan and Vietnam.
There are currently more than 489,000 foreign workers in Taiwan, 25.6 percent of whom are from Vietnam, making the country the second-largest source of migrant workers in Taiwan, according to official statistics.
Fast food chain McDonald's is to raise prices by up to NT$5 on some products at its restaurants across Taiwan, starting on Wednesday next week, the company announced today. The prices of all extra value meals and sharing boxes are to increase by NT$5, while breakfast combos and creamy corn soup would go up by NT$3, the company said in a statement. The price of the main items of those meals, if ordered individually, would remain the same. Meanwhile, the price of a medium-sized lemon iced tea and hot cappuccino would rise by NT$3, extra dipping sauces for chicken nuggets would go up
Yangmingshan National Park’s Qingtiangang (擎天崗) nature area has gone viral after a park livestream camera observed a couple in the throes of intimate congress, which was broadcast live on YouTube, drawing large late-night crowds and sparking a backlash over noise, bright lights and disruption to wildlife habitat. The area’s livestream footage appeared to show a couple engaging in sexual activity on a picnic table in the park on Friday last week, with the uncensored footage streamed publicly online. The footage quickly spread across social media, prompting a tide of visitors to travel to the site to “check in” and recreate the
GROUNDED: A KMT lawmaker proposed eliminating drone development programs and freezing funding for counterdrone systems, despite China’s adoption of the technology China has deployed attack drones at air bases near the Taiwan Strait in a strategy aimed at overwhelming Taiwan’s air defense systems through saturation attacks, the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said. The council’s latest quarterly report on China said that satellite imagery and open-source intelligence indicate that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had converted retired J-6 fighter jets into J-6W drones, which the PLA has stationed at six air bases near Taiwan, five in China’s Fujian Province and one in Guangdong Province. The report cited J. Michael Dahm, a senior fellow at the US-based Mitchell Institute, as saying that China has
Carrefour Taiwan is to begin using a new name from the start of July, but it cannot divulge the name until then, the chairman of the supermarket chain's parent company said today. President Chain Store Co chairman Lo Chih-hsien (羅智先) was asked by reporters after a shareholders' meeting to confirm whether the company has settled on a new name for the supermarket brand. In March, the government-registered name of two Carrefour Taiwan branches was quietly changed to "Le Chia Kang" (樂家康) in Chinese, raising speculation that has been selected as the name. Lo said that because of local regulations and contractual obligations, the