Former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) is to lead a group of students to China on Beijing’s invitation next month in a bid to boost cross-strait academic exchanges, Ma Ying-jeou Foundation director Hsiao Hsu-tsen (蕭旭岑) said on Monday.
From April 1 to 10, the group is to visit significant cultural sites and businesses in Guangdong, Shaanxi and Beijing, Hsiao told reporters.
Ma, Hsiao, former Presidential Office director Wang Kuang-tzu (王光慈) and National Chengchi University professor Chiu Kun-shuan (邱坤玄) are to lead a group of 20 students on the trip, he said.
Photo: Chu Pei-hsiung, Taipei Times
They are to also attend the annual offering at the mausoleum of the Yellow Emperor in Shaanxi, as well as visit schools including Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou and Peking University, he added.
Ma made a similar trip in March last year leading 30 students to Nanjing, Wuhan, Changsha, Chongqing and Shanghai.
The trip marked the first time a former head of state visited China.
Last year’s trip had an “extremely positive impact on cross-strait relations,” allowing Chinese people to see the vitality of Taiwan’s students, Hsiao said.
It was followed up by a visit in July last year by students from five top Chinese universities to Taiwan, giving them a deeper understanding of Taiwan, he said.
Considering that most countries issue more than five denominations of banknotes, the central bank has decided to redesign all five denominations, the bank said as it prepares for the first major overhaul of the banknotes in more than 24 years. Central bank Governor Yang Chin-lung (楊金龍) is expected to report to the Legislative Yuan today on the bank’s operations and the redesign’s progress. The bank in a report sent to the legislature ahead of today’s meeting said it had commissioned a survey on the public’s preferences. Survey results showed that NT$100 and NT$1,000 banknotes are the most commonly used, while NT$200 and NT$2,000
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) is suspending retaliation measures against South Korea that were set to take effect tomorrow, after Seoul said it is updating its e-arrival system, MOFA said today. The measures were to be a new round of retaliation after Taiwan on March 1 changed South Korea's designation on government-issued alien resident certificates held by South Korean nationals to "South Korea” from the "Republic of Korea," the country’s official name. The move came after months of protests to Seoul over its listing of Taiwan as "China (Taiwan)" in dropdown menus on its new online immigration entry system. MOFA last week