Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Yeh Yi-jin (葉宜津) yesterday said that the Ministry of Transportation and Communications should within one week submit a report on how to deter people on tourist visas from overstaying.
Yeh made the remarks at a meeting of the legislature’s Transportation Committee after the Tourism Bureau on Tuesday said that 152 of 153 Vietnamese passport holders went missing soon after they arrived in Kaohsiung on tours last week. It later revised the number of those missing to 148 and 11 of those had been found as of yesterday.
The incident has triggered calls for the government to revisit the Kuan Hung Pilot Project, an electronic visa program launched in 2015 to boost the number of “quality tour groups” visiting from India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos and India — nations named in the government’s New Southbound Policy.
The government only began to sense that it was a serious matter after last week’s incident, Yeh said.
However, prior to last week, 348 Vietnamese had overstayed while visiting on tourist visas this year, she said.
The project does not require the government to check entry and exit records, nor do visitors who arrive as part of the program need to present financial statements, Yeh said, adding that the government did not seem to care whether they had purchased return tickets before it granted them visas.
“The government has practically opened the door wide open, but it punished travel agencies instead of the missing tourists,” Yeh said, adding that the government’s error was greater than that of the travel agencies.
Yeh denied a ministry request to have one month to hand in a report on the incident, which would include measures to prevent similar situations.
Deputy Minister of Transportation and Communications Chi Wen-chung (祁文中) said that the bureau, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the National Immigration Agency would study the problem and find ways to address them.
Nevertheless, Minister Without Portfolio Chang Ching-sen (張景森), who is supervising tourism affairs, said on Facebook that runaway tourists were as inevitable as people dropping a few sesame seeds on the floor when they eat Chinese flatbread for breakfast.
In the past few years, about 226,000 visitors from Southeast Asian nations have visited Taiwan through the program, but only 414 contravened the regulations, “but Chinese Nationalist Party [KMT] lawmakers and the media in the past few days have pummeled the government for implementing the New Southbound Policy, as if the Kuan Hung Pilot Project has filled the streets with fugitives and hookers,” Chang said.
The government needs to revisit how it grants visas to Southeast Asian visitors, he said, adding that it would not shrink from enforcing a policy that would reduce the nation’s reliance on Chinese tourists.
China might accelerate its strategic actions toward Taiwan, the South China Sea and across the first island chain, after the US officially entered a military conflict with Iran, as Beijing would perceive Washington as incapable of fighting a two-front war, a military expert said yesterday. The US’ ongoing conflict with Iran is not merely an act of retaliation or a “delaying tactic,” but a strategic military campaign aimed at dismantling Tehran’s nuclear capabilities and reshaping the regional order in the Middle East, said National Defense University distinguished adjunct lecturer Holmes Liao (廖宏祥), former McDonnell Douglas Aerospace representative in Taiwan. If
TO BE APPEALED: The environment ministry said coal reduction goals had to be reached within two months, which was against the principle of legitimate expectation The Taipei High Administrative Court on Thursday ruled in favor of the Taichung Environmental Protection Bureau in its administrative litigation against the Ministry of Environment for the rescission of a NT$18 million fine (US$609,570) imposed by the bureau on the Taichung Power Plant in 2019 for alleged excess coal power generation. The bureau in November 2019 revised what it said was a “slip of the pen” in the text of the operating permit granted to the plant — which is run by Taiwan Power Co (Taipower) — in October 2017. The permit originally read: “reduce coal use by 40 percent from Jan.
‘SPEY’ REACTION: Beijing said its Eastern Theater Command ‘organized troops to monitor and guard the entire process’ of a Taiwan Strait transit China sent 74 warplanes toward Taiwan between late Thursday and early yesterday, 61 of which crossed the median line in the Taiwan Strait. It was not clear why so many planes were scrambled, said the Ministry of National Defense, which tabulated the flights. The aircraft were sent in two separate tranches, the ministry said. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Thursday “confirmed and welcomed” a transit by the British Royal Navy’s HMS Spey, a River-class offshore patrol vessel, through the Taiwan Strait a day earlier. The ship’s transit “once again [reaffirmed the Strait’s] status as international waters,” the foreign ministry said. “Such transits by
Taiwan is doing everything it can to prevent a military conflict with China, including building up asymmetric defense capabilities and fortifying public resilience, Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) said in a recent interview. “Everything we are doing is to prevent a conflict from happening, whether it is 2027 or before that or beyond that,” Hsiao told American podcaster Shawn Ryan of the Shawn Ryan Show. She was referring to a timeline cited by several US military and intelligence officials, who said Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the Chinese People’s Liberation Army to be ready to take military action against Taiwan
RSS