Before planned protests by students against the high cost and shortage of tickets for cross-strait flights, officials and airlines on Tuesday said rumors have exaggerated a situation caused by China.
Rising prices and ticket scarcity have been linked to a dispute between Taiwan and China over the Beijing’s unilateral activation of the northbound M503 flight route and its extension lines.
A source in the airline industry said on condition of anonymity that the protesters’ demand for compensation by the government to cover their losses was “misdirected.”
“They should protest the issue with China, not the Taiwanese government,” the source said.
Chinese airlines have more than doubled airfare to about NT$30,000, which is in line with their practice of hiking prices when demand is high, the source added.
Taiwanese carriers have kept their fares at less than NT$15,000, because they are obliged to follow the Civil Aeronautics Administration’s price controls, the source said.
Taiwanese airlines have urged their Chinese counterparts to maintain prices at a reasonable level during the Lunar New Year holiday, but they have not been receptive to such concerns, the source added.
As Beijing has a controlling interest in most Chinese airlines, the situation is likely the result of a Chinese strategy to undermine confidence in the Taiwanese government, the source said.
The agency on Tuesday said tickets were available for China Eastern Airlines and XiamenAir flights from the Chinese cities of Shanghai, Nanjing, Wuxi, Hangzhou, Hefei, Changsha, Fuzhou and Xiamen, adding that the Straits Exchange Foundation was ready to assist any Taiwanese traveler in need of tickets.
It also reminded Taiwanese airlines that they have an obligation to comply with government price controls, and called on Chinese carriers to refrain from hiking prices and take into consideration the travel needs of Taiwanese businesspeople and students.
Rumors of a lack of seats have harmed cross-strait goodwill and confused Taiwanese business travelers, Executive Yuan spokesman Hsu Kuo-yung (徐國勇) said.
Although China Eastern Airlines and XiamenAir have canceled additional flights from the eight cities, those scheduled before the holiday would be unaffected, the Mainland Affairs Council said.
Taiwanese business associations in the eight affected cities had reported very few requests for help, indicating that the problem is not severe, the council said.
Most Taiwanese students in China returned home last month during the winter break, and the Straits Exchange Foundation has already assisted the minority who opted to travel during the holiday, it added.
“Reports of Taiwanese students being unable to obtain tickets to fly home are likely baseless rumors,” the council said.
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