Neither side of the Taiwan Strait will cap the number of additional cross-strait flights during next year’s Lunar New Year holiday, the Civil Aeronautics Administration said, although five Chinese airports would limit flights.
In addition to already scheduled flights, additional flights are usually provided from Taiwan and China to ease cross-strait travel during the holiday.
However, both sides must negotiate the number of additional flights made available each year.
The agency said next year’s deal was reached after a recent meeting in China between Taiwanese and Chinese civil aviation officials, with both sides agreeing that additional flights be offered between Feb. 5 and March 5.
The CAA said that five Chinese airports have set caps on the maximum number of additional flights.
Shanghai Pudong International Airport is capped at 165 flights and Beijing is capped at 39 flights. Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Hangzhou airports are capped at 19, 24 and 57 respectively.
Additional flights to and from Shanghai, where a large number of Taiwanese live, increased by 57 percent over this year, the CAA said.
In related news, the latest statistics from the Ministry of the Interior showed that Chinese nationals accounted for the highest percentage of visitors to Taiwan in the first 11 months of the year.
In the period from January to last month, of the nation’s 8.96 million overseas visitors, 54.5 percent were from China, Hong Kong and Macao, 16.6 percent from Japan and 5.7 percent from the US, the figures showed.
The most notable growth in terms of visits to Taiwan was an 11.4 percent increase in the number of travelers by boat between Kinmen County and China’s coastal cities in the time period, the data showed.
Up until last month, Taiwanese made a total of 10.94 million trips overseas, with 48.7 percent traveling to China, Hong Kong and Macao, and 25.2 percent to Japan.
In total, the number of arrivals and departures in Taiwan was 39.67 million in the first 11 months of this year, up 14 percent from the same period last year, the statistics showed.
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