Hundreds of Chinese immigrant spouses of Taiwanese nationals in Kaohsiung yesterday urged the government to shorten the wait required to obtain Taiwanese identity cards to four years, from the present six.
Several Kaohsiung elected officials backed the call. Chinese spouses in the southern city have since March 2013 urged the government to cut their waiting period to four years, in line with the waiting period for foreign spouses of other nationalities, said Zhan Xiuying (湛秀英), the director of the Kaohsiung New Immigrant Social Development Association.
It takes Chinese spouses six years to become eligible for Taiwanese identity papers, while it takes four years for immigrant spouses from other countries, Chan said.
Taiwan has nearly 350,000 Chinese spouses of Taiwanese nationals and about 27,000 Chinese spouses in Kaohsiung have not yet obtained ID cards. The government cut the waiting period to obtain IDs from eight to six years for Chinese spouses in 2008, but there is still a gap compared with other foreign spouses.
In a show of their support, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Huang Chao-shun (黃昭順) and KMT Kaohsiung city councilors Li Mei-jhen (李眉蓁) and Tsai Chin-yen (蔡金晏) held a news conference yesterday, calling for a law revision to accelerate the naturalization process for the Chinese nationals. All of them accused the green camp led by the Democratic Progressive Party of discriminating against Chinese spouses by stalling the law revision bill.
Chinese spouses at the event said they hope the restriction that limits eligibility for Chinese to serve in public offices in Taiwan to 10 years after obtaining identity papers can be relaxed.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
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