China Airlines (CAL) president Hsieh Shih-chien (謝世謙) is to become its chairman, the China Aviation Development Foundation, the airline’s largest shareholder, said yesterday.
The foundation holds 35.9 percent of CAL’s shares, while the second and third-largest shareholders are the National Development Fund and Chunghwa Telecom, which hold 9.9 percent and 4.86 percent respectively.
Chinese-language media reports yesterday said the decision to replace CAL chairman Ho Nuan-hsuan (何煖軒) was approved by the Presidential Office, the Executive Yuan and the Ministry of Transportation and Communications.
Photo: Liao Chen-huei
The foundation said that it was scheduled to propose that Hsieh become chairman during a meeting of its board last night, after which it would notify the airline and request CAL convene its own board to vote on the move.
The airline would later decide when to convene its own board, the foundation said.
After graduating from Soochow University, Hsieh worked his way up from an entry-level position with CAL to managerial positions, including at its offices in Kaohsiung, Indonesia and Australia. He also served as chairman of TACT Logistics, part of the China Airlines Group.
He was appointed CAL president on June 24, 2016, amid a strike against the airline by the Taoyuan Flight Attendants Union.
Hsieh was in charge of negotiating with representatives of Taoyuan Union of Pilots after the union went on strike against CAL in February, and was credited with helping end the strike in seven days by remaining on good terms with Taoyuan Union of Pilots members.
The Taoyuan Union of Pilots yesterday affirmed Hsieh’s appointment.
Hsieh established a direct and smooth channel of communication with the union ever since it signed a collective labor agreement with the airline to end a strike on Feb. 14, the pilots union said in a statement.
“Through the multiple conversations with the airline’s management, we have felt that Hsieh was willing to listen to union members and viewed the interaction between the company’s management and the union from the most positive light,” the pilots union said. “We hope that Hsieh can fundamentally improve the labor-management relations after he becomes the chairman, as the relations need to be founded on mutual trust. We also hope that his leadership can unite CAL’s employees so that we can together to improve the company’s operation and enhance its service quality and aviation safety.”
During the strike, the pilots union had called for Ho to be replaced as chairman.
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