China supports efforts to speedily conclude ongoing negotiations with Taiwan over a trade in goods agreement, but is concerned about uncertainties created by the nation’s legislature, Minister of Economic Affairs Woody Duh (杜紫軍) said on Saturday.
Duh said Chinese Minister of Commerce Gao Hucheng (高虎城) promised to speed up trade talks with Taiwan during an hour-long meeting on the sidelines of the APEC ministerial meeting in Beijing.
However, Gao also expressed concerns about the uncertainties surrounding a draft act on supervision of agreements negotiated and signed across the Taiwan Strait, which has been stalled in the Legislative Yuan since April, Duh added.
Taiwan signed the cross-strait service trade pact with China in June last year, subsequent to the 2010 Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA).
With growing public demand for more transparency in cross-strait agreements, the legislature has decided to review the draft act to address the issue before ratifying the service trade pact.
Duh said he responded by suggesting that the two sides should first work on technical issues in their ongoing talks on the trade in goods agreement.
Meanwhile, officials in Taipei said the Ministry of Economic Affairs is ready to return to the table for trade talks with China, even though the stalled legislative process is putting pressure on negotiators.
Taiwan and China held their ninth round of talks over the trade pact in September, and Industrial Development Bureau Director-General Wu Ming-ji (吳明機) said the two sides have agreed to lower import tariffs in five phases.
Taiwan is seeking to include its more competitive flat panel, machine tools, auto and petrochemical sectors in the first phase, he added.
Bureau of Foreign Trade Deputy Director-General David Hsu (徐大衛) said in Taipei that China has slowed down its pace of talks over the goods trade agreement, since the service trade pact has failed to clear the legislature.
Hsu and Wu hope to conclude the goods trade agreement negotiations with China less than six months after China and South Korea wrap up their ongoing free-trade deal talks, but said that the key factor remains the stalled draft act on oversight of cross-strait agreements.
The stalled legislative review of the draft act weighs heavily on trade talk negotiators, because they fear they might again face accusations of “selling out the nation,” through under-the-table deals, as negotiators did in the service trade talks, Wu 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
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
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