Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) yesterday defended the government’s policy of allowing senior Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials to visit Taiwan, but added that exceptions might be made for those who have been involved in crackdowns on members of the Falun Gong.
The government will consider whether it is appropriate for a Chinese official to visit Taiwan if he or she is identified as having been involved in actions against the Falun Gong or where individuals are considered to have violated widely accepted principles of justice or morality, Wu said.
The Premier made the remark when asked by reporters for a comment on a report in yesterday’s Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister paper) that questioned recently revised rules on allowing Chinese citizens with legal backgrounds to visit Taiwan.
One of the eight categories in the revised rules refers to members of CCP commissions on politics and law, some of whom have been accused by the international community of masterminding the crackdown on the Falun Gong in China.
Wu said that allowing Chinese legal professionals to visit Taiwan would clearly benefit joint efforts on eradicating cross-strait criminal activity.
Giving Beijing’s agreeing to extradite George Lin (林南海), a Taiwanese-American man who falsely claimed his luggage contained explosives during a flight from Taipei to Shanghai on Saturday, as an example, Wu said that both sides of the strait have to work together to fight crime.
There are 77 incidents of Taiwanese travelers going missing in China between January last year and last month, the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) said. More than 40 remain unreachable, SEF Secretary-General Luo Wen-jia (羅文嘉) said on Friday. Most of the reachable people in the more than 30 other incidents were allegedly involved in fraud, while some had disappeared for personal reasons, Luo said. One of these people is Kuo Yu-hsuan (郭宇軒), a 22-year-old Taiwanese man from Kaohsiung who went missing while visiting China in August. China’s Taiwan Affairs Office last month said in a news statement that he was under investigation
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Taiwan was listed in 14th place among the world's wealthiest country in terms of GDP per capita, in the latest rankings released on Monday by Forbes magazine. Taiwan's GDP per capita was US$76,860, which put it at No. 14 on the list of the World's 100 Richest Countries this year, one spot above Hong Kong with US$75,130. The magazine's list of the richest countries in the world is compiled based on GDP per capita data, as estimated by the IMF. However, for a more precise measure of a nation's wealth, the magazine also considers purchasing power parity, which is a metric used to
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