More controversy erupted yesterday over the attendance of six government officials at a forum cohosted by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Shanghai, in addition to alleged violations of administrative neutrality.
The Chinese-language Next Magazine yesterday reported that the board and lodging expenses of the six officials during their three-day stay in Shanghai earlier this month were paid by China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, while the KMT covered the cost of the flight tickets.
Asked for comment yesterday, KMT spokesperson Yang Wei-chung (楊偉中) said the report “did not get all the facts right.”
Photo: Lin Cheng-kun, Taipei Times
The Research Center for Relations across the Taiwan Strait under the Taiwan Affairs Office joined with the KMT’s National Policy Foundation in covering all of the expenses of all the members of the delegation from Taiwan, excluding KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫), Yang said.
Chu traveled to Shanghai to attend the forum and then to Beijing to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at his own expense, Yang said.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers say that the six officials violated the Public Servants’ Administrative Neutrality Act (公務人員中立法).
Minister of Civil Service Chang Che-shen (張哲琛) has said he “personally” considered the presence of the six officials at the forum “inappropriate,” but he added that they did not violate the act because they were granted leaves of absence.
In the event of government officials taking days off work to participate in political party-hosted activities, it is “not illegal” for them to have expenses paid by the hosts or to receive payments for their attendance, “even though it is inappropriate,” Chang said yesterday when asked to comment on the report.
However, DPP legislators were not convinced.
DPP Legislator Pasuya Yao (姚文智) at a press conference yesterday said that President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) had once criticized former minister of transportation Yeh Kuang-shih (葉匡時) for attending a birthday banquet hosted by a private company.
“I wonder how the president would view such unethnical behavior, which is even more serious than Yeh’s?” Yao said.
Additional reporting by Loa Iok-sin
The military has spotted two Chinese warships operating in waters near Penghu County in the Taiwan Strait and sent its own naval and air forces to monitor the vessels, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) said. Beijing sends warships and warplanes into the waters and skies around Taiwan on an almost daily basis, drawing condemnation from Taipei. While the ministry offers daily updates on the locations of Chinese military aircraft, it only rarely gives details of where Chinese warships are operating, generally only when it detects aircraft carriers, as happened last week. A Chinese destroyer and a frigate entered waters to the southwest
A magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck off the coast of Yilan County at 8:39pm tonight, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said, with no immediate reports of damage or injuries. The epicenter was 38.7km east-northeast of Yilan County Hall at a focal depth of 98.3km, the CWA’s Seismological Center said. The quake’s maximum intensity, which gauges the actual physical effect of a seismic event, was a level 4 on Taiwan’s 7-tier intensity scale, the center said. That intensity level was recorded in Yilan County’s Nanao Township (南澳), Hsinchu County’s Guansi Township (關西), Nantou County’s Hehuanshan (合歡山) and Hualien County’s Yanliao (鹽寮). An intensity of 3 was
Instead of focusing solely on the threat of a full-scale military invasion, the US and its allies must prepare for a potential Chinese “quarantine” of Taiwan enforced through customs inspections, Stanford University Hoover fellow Eyck Freymann said in a Foreign Affairs article published on Wednesday. China could use various “gray zone” tactics in “reconfiguring the regional and ultimately the global economic order without a war,” said Freymann, who is also a nonresident research fellow at the US Naval War College. China might seize control of Taiwan’s links to the outside world by requiring all flights and ships entering or leaving Taiwan
The next minimum wage hike is expected to exceed NT$30,000, President William Lai (賴清德) said yesterday during an award ceremony honoring “model workers,” including migrant workers, at the Presidential Office ahead of Workers’ Day today. Lai said he wished to thank the awardees on behalf of the nation and extend his most sincere respect for their hard work, on which Taiwan’s prosperity has been built. Lai specifically thanked 10 migrant workers selected for the award, saying that although they left their home countries to further their own goals, their efforts have benefited Taiwan as well. The nation’s industrial sector and small businesses lay
RSS