The government has braced for China’s suspension of permits to individual travelers planning visits to Taiwan before elections in January next year, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) said yesterday, adding that China’s mounting military drills in the region are unwise and irresponsible.
The Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism on Wednesday abruptly announced in a one-sentence statement that 47 Chinese cities would stop issuing permits for individual tourists to Taiwan from yesterday due to the state of cross-strait relations, without specifying an effective period for the suspension.
Tsai said that she months ago ordered her administration to prepare for such a move by Beijing before the election, and thanked officials for immediately launching plans to boost domestic tourism.
Photo: CNA
To diminish the tourism industry’s reliance on Chinese visitors, the government has introduced many policies to attract tourists from other countries, she said, adding that the nation last year received a new high of more than 11 million foreign visitors.
Describing China’s suspension of individual travel permits as a “big mistake,” Tsai said that many young Chinese appear more “energetic” when visiting Taiwan after experiencing its free and democratic lifestyle without online limitations and constant surveillance.
China only appears more abominable to Taiwanese when it uses its citizens as a political bargaining chip, she said.
Meanwhile, China’s mounting military drills in regional waters and airspace have disturbed neighboring countries and deepened global distrust of China, Tsai said, describing Beijing’s actions as “unwise” and “irresponsible.”
She called on the public to unite in the face of such threats and reaffirmed the military ability to defend Taiwan’s sovereignty.
Taiwan’s economic performance in the second quarter was better than that of the other three so-called “Asian dragons” — South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore — which demonstrated the nation’s ability to boost the economy in the face of international turbulence, she said, citing data released on Wednesday by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics.
A video of military drills released by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) late on Wednesday was intended to threaten the people of Hong Kong when the territory was at its tensest moment, Tsai said.
Asked if the video suggests that China might use its military to suppress protests in Hong Kong, Tsai said that more observation is needed.
“Beijing is celebrating Armed Forces Day in a most uncivilized fashion. The people of #HongKong are gifted a video of vile threats!” Minister of Foreign Affairs Joseph Wu (吳釗燮) said on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ official Twitter account.
“The PLA is supposed to protect the people, not pound them into submission. It’s time for authoritarian China to back off!” he wrote.
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
MANAGING DIFFERENCES: In a meeting days after the US president signed a massive foreign aid bill, Antony Blinken raised concerns with the Chinese president about Taiwan US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday met with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and senior Chinese officials, stressing the importance of “responsibly managing” the differences between the US and China as the two sides butt heads over a number of contentious bilateral, regional and global issues, including Taiwan and the South China Sea. Talks between the two sides have increased over the past few months, even as differences have grown. Blinken said he raised concerns with Xi about Taiwan and the South China Sea, along with China’s support for Russia and its invasion of Ukraine, as well as other issues
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B