Despite vigorous promotion, Beijing’s “31 incentives” to attract Taiwanese businesses and professionals have only had a limited effect on Taiwan, Taiwanese academics said yesterday.
Statistics released yesterday by China’s Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) showed that the number of Taiwanese visiting China last year surpassed 6 million, an increase of 4.58 percent from 2017.
However, that percentage represents only marginal growth over the 4.53 percent increase from 2016 to 2017, and significantly lower growth than the 14.65 percent increase from 2009 to 2010.
Last year, about 6.14 million Taiwanese businesspeople, students and workers traveled to China, TAO statistics showed.
The TAO claims that the measures are meant to offer “Taiwanese compatriots” a sense of satisfaction and honor. Its measures have so far targeted 80 provincial, regional or city locations.
“Fujian residents are insured socially and medically — that’s how Taiwanese residents will be insured. We are one family in every sense of the word,” Fujian Province Governor Yu Weiguo (于偉國) said at a news conference in Beijing yesterday.
A China News Service report yesterday said that the Chinese government in the first half of this year approved 2,468 opportunities in China in which Taiwanese can invest, and that Taiwanese investment reached about US$980 million.
However, figures released by the Ministry of Economic Affairs showed that remittances by Taiwanese firms operating in China had as of yesterday exceeded NT$452 billion (US$14.56 billion).
Chinese statistics are often tweaked a bit to serve as propaganda, Chien Hsin University of Science and Technology professor Yen Chien-fa (顏建發) said yesterday, adding that the TAO statistics support that the measures have been ineffective.
According to statistics released by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics, the number of Taiwanese who in 2017 pursued a career in China totaled about 405,000 — a 10-year low — suggesting that the number last year could have been much less than 400,000.
About 60 percent of Taiwanese have never visited China, most of whom are young people, said Lin Wen-cheng (林文程), professor at National Sun Yat-sen University’s Institute of China and Asia-Pacific Studies.
This has led Chinese authorities to hold summer camps and free tours targeting first-time visitors, which they claim allow Taiwanese to witness the “greatness of the motherland,” Lin said.
While people going to China for a short stay might be deceived by its grandeur, living there long-term would show them how their freedoms are deprived and their activities watched, Lin said, adding that Taiwanese would likely have a difficult time adapting to those conditions.
That is the main reason that Beijing’s measures promoted as “incentives” have not encouraged more Taiwanese to go and work there, Lin added.
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