A stamp exhibition featuring letters sent between Taiwan and China is to be held from Wednesday to Oct. 20 to commemorate 30 years of cross-strait exchanges since the Republic of China government began allowing visits to China in 1987.
The exhibition, which was organized by Chunghwa Post Co, is part of a Mainland Affairs Council campaign to celebrate three decades of cross-strait relations, company spokeswoman Lan Shu-chen (藍淑貞) said.
“The exhibition also reminds us that there are numerous perspectives on cross-strait exchanges,” Lan said, adding that postal ties between Taiwan and China have always been close, regardless of which political party holds power.
The exhibition at the Postal Museum in Taipei is to showcase 60 philatelic displays created by the company or from private collections in Taiwan, China, Hong Kong and Macau, she said.
The earliest items date to the Qing Dynasty, while others were sent during the 1940s, during the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War, Lan said.
One of the exhibition’s highlights is a stamp issued in 2014 that features a swan goose, which symbolizes letter carriers in Chinese culture.
That year, Chunghwa Post and its Chinese counterpart, China Post, worked together for the first time to issue stamps with different swan goose designs to celebrate ties, Lan said, adding that only the Taiwan stamp will be on display.
No representatives from China are to attend, Lan said, but added that this was always the organizer’s intention.
Postal services from the two sides continue to have close relations and have been taking turns hosting rare stamp exhibitions since 2013, the latest having concluded in Tianjin just last month, she said.
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