In the wake of an offer to allow Chinese tourists to visit Taiwan, a legislator yesterday said Beijing should show good will by taking back the 2,223 illegal Chinese immigrants currently detained here.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislator and caucus whip, Peter Lin (
He said Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Lien Chan (
He said if China really wants to show good will to the Taiwanese, it should help solve the problem as soon as possible.
Lin said according to the Immigration Office under the National Police Agency, three detention centers located in Hsinchu, Ilan and Matsu currently hold hundreds of Chinese immigrants. Detained within the facilities are 711 males and 1,512 females.
Lin said the immigrants are waiting for boats to take them back to China. They are waiting indefinitely, as the Chinese government has purposely delayed their repatriation.
The government spends a lot of money every year to care for the detainees, and this situation could potentially be made worse by an influx of Chinese tourists, who may abscond while visiting Taiwan, Lin said.
In addition, according to law enforcement officials, there are 480 Taiwanese criminals on the lam in China, including Wu Tse-yuan (伍澤元), former Pingtung county commissioner who was found guilty of corruption; Chu An-hsiung (朱安雄), a former Kaohsiung City Council speaker found guilty of vote-buying in a council speakership election; and Eddie Liu (劉偉杰), a former employee of the prominent Taiwanese law firm Lee and Li Attorneys-at-Law, who embezzled NT$3 billion, Lin said.
According to Immigration Office of the National Police Agency, 38,617 Chinese people have traveled to Taiwan after the their government allowed tourists to come to here by application, in a trial period which began in 2002 and was discontinued in March.
Lin said National Security Bureau Deputy Director Wang Chin-wang (
According to Lin, Wang said that easing the travel ban on Chinese tourists would have some impact on the nation's security.
Lin said the government should therefore not allow Chinese tourists to come to Taiwan.
The military has spotted two Chinese warships operating in waters near Penghu County in the Taiwan Strait and sent its own naval and air forces to monitor the vessels, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) said. Beijing sends warships and warplanes into the waters and skies around Taiwan on an almost daily basis, drawing condemnation from Taipei. While the ministry offers daily updates on the locations of Chinese military aircraft, it only rarely gives details of where Chinese warships are operating, generally only when it detects aircraft carriers, as happened last week. A Chinese destroyer and a frigate entered waters to the southwest
A magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck off the coast of Yilan County at 8:39pm tonight, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said, with no immediate reports of damage or injuries. The epicenter was 38.7km east-northeast of Yilan County Hall at a focal depth of 98.3km, the CWA’s Seismological Center said. The quake’s maximum intensity, which gauges the actual physical effect of a seismic event, was a level 4 on Taiwan’s 7-tier intensity scale, the center said. That intensity level was recorded in Yilan County’s Nanao Township (南澳), Hsinchu County’s Guansi Township (關西), Nantou County’s Hehuanshan (合歡山) and Hualien County’s Yanliao (鹽寮). An intensity of 3 was
Instead of focusing solely on the threat of a full-scale military invasion, the US and its allies must prepare for a potential Chinese “quarantine” of Taiwan enforced through customs inspections, Stanford University Hoover fellow Eyck Freymann said in a Foreign Affairs article published on Wednesday. China could use various “gray zone” tactics in “reconfiguring the regional and ultimately the global economic order without a war,” said Freymann, who is also a nonresident research fellow at the US Naval War College. China might seize control of Taiwan’s links to the outside world by requiring all flights and ships entering or leaving Taiwan
The next minimum wage hike is expected to exceed NT$30,000, President William Lai (賴清德) said yesterday during an award ceremony honoring “model workers,” including migrant workers, at the Presidential Office ahead of Workers’ Day today. Lai said he wished to thank the awardees on behalf of the nation and extend his most sincere respect for their hard work, on which Taiwan’s prosperity has been built. Lai specifically thanked 10 migrant workers selected for the award, saying that although they left their home countries to further their own goals, their efforts have benefited Taiwan as well. The nation’s industrial sector and small businesses lay
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