Experts from Taiwan and China agreed at a forum in Taipei on Tuesday that the two sides should cooperate more closely in economic and trade liberalization to address global challenges.
Zhang Youwen (張幼文), director of the Institute of World Economy at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, told the free-trade zones forum that the two nations “still have a lot of things to do” in terms of boosting investment and that the tasks are linked closely to trade in services.
This makes cross-strait collaboration on services more urgent, he said.
Ed Liu (劉茂賢), president of Taiwan’s government-invested Hua Nan Financial Holding Co, expressed concern that the local financial sector could be adversely affected if China’s free-trade zones are implemented across its territory.
To minimize the potential impact, Liu said, the financial sectors across the Taiwan Strait should speed up the joint pursuit of opening up.
Noting that China is forecast to become the world’s biggest consumer market by 2020 and then the world’s biggest service market, Qin Shuo (秦朔), vice president of Shanghai Media Group and chief editor of China Business News, said that means anyone standing downwind of the powerful force “will take flight.”
According to the National Development Council, the government’s free economic pilot zones, currently under development, would serve as a test run for regulatory loosening that would facilitate the movement of personnel, goods and technology.
A government-drafted bill to establish a legal basis for the zones is still awaiting review in the legislature.
Meanwhile, China set up its first free-trade area in Shanghai in September last year.
The Chinese government decided in January to approve another 12 free-trade zones, including one each in Tianjin and in Guangdong Province that could launch in about a year.
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