CULTURE
Exhibit to feature Qin culture
An exhibition on the culture of the Qin Dynasty is to be featured at the National Palace Museum in Taipei from Saturday to Aug. 31, including the largest-ever loan of artifacts from the famed Terra-cotta Army. China has loaned 10 terra-cotta warriors and hundreds of other artifacts to the exhibition. Most of the artifacts are to be displayed for the first time in Taiwan and 70 percent of the exhibits are first-grade cultural relics with a total value of about NT$3 billion (US$92.93 million), a museum spokesman said. The exhibition contains 189 items, including a number of life-size clay statues of warriors along with weapons and decorative items made from jade and copper, according to the museum. The warriors were buried about 2,200 years ago to guard the tomb of Qin Shihuang (秦始皇), a Qin Dynasty ruler, who created China’s first unitary state by conquering rival kingdoms.
FOOD
Agency touts QR system
Consumers in Taiwan should try to obtain as much information as possible about agricultural products and can do so by using a tracing system that was introduced last year, the Agriculture and Food Agency said. Consumers can see the address and telephone numbers of producers by scanning QR codes on packages of certain agricultural products, and in some cases, view laboratory test results, the agency said. Since April last year, when the system was introduced, about 9,169 sets of QR codes have been issued for products in 409 categories, including rice, vegetables, fruits and processed agricultural products, according to the agency. It said shoppers are encouraged to use their smartphones to scan QR codes and obtain information about products’ origins.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods