The Bureau of High Speed Rail yesterday signed a contract with Cathay Life Insurance Group to develop a site near the high-speed rail station in Taichung.
The company was selected in November to develop the No. 101 and No. 108 commercial-use properties near the station in Wuri District (烏日), which cover an area of about 3.64 hectares, for 30 years.
An e-commerce logistics center, a tourism factory and a conference center are among the facilities planned for the site, with an estimated investment of more than NT$3.1 billion (US$99.5 million). The buildings are scheduled to be completed by 2017.
Bureau of High Speed Rail Director-General Allen Hu (胡湘麟) said the Taichung project will be its first development in central Taiwan using the surface right of the properties to attract investors, but Cathay Life’s second investment involving properties near a high-speed rail station.
Cathay Life is building a shopping outlet near the Greater Taoyuan station, with the first stage of the construction to be completed this summer.
Hu said the location of the Taichung station — close to the Port of Taichung, Taichung Airport and the Central Taiwan Science Park — allows passengers to access the major cities along the west coast within an hour.
“The high-speed rail station in Taichung is ranked No. 2 in terms of passengers accessing the stations,” he said.
The project should help boost the nation’s logistics industry and the national economy, Hu added.
Cathay Life Insurance Group senior vice president Andrew Liu (劉上旗) said the firm’s assets come from the premiums paid by Cathay Life’s 7 million clients.
The company is required by government regulations to spend 45 to 50 percent of the premiums in overseas investments, he said.
“However, we very much look forward to opportunities to invest in Taiwan,” Liu said. “Not only can the project help keep the money in the nation, it can also help develop the economy.”
While focusing on revitalizing the land around high-speed rail stations, the bureau is also concentrating on imminent potential bankruptcy of the Taiwan High Speed Rail Corp (THSRC), which could come as early as April.
Asked whether there is still a chance to save the company, Hu said the THSRC’s board of directors would itself have to propose a financial restructuring plan, but one that did not involve an extension of the concession period.
Extending the concession period would require legislative approval and THSRC might not be able to finish the necessary procedures by April, Hu said.
With an amendment to the Statute for Encouragement of Private Participation in Transportation Infrastructure (獎勵民間參與交通建設條例) stuck in the legislature, Hu said the government would not penalize the THSRC board if it tried to block a government takeover.
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