Lishan Guest House, which was formerly one of Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) favorite summer houses, could be reopened to the public next year after the Tri-Mountain National Scenic Area Administration said it was planning to outsource operations to a private contractor under an operation-transfer model.
Administration director Hsu Cheng-long (許正隆) said the Tourism Bureau had spent about NT$100 million (US$3.3 million) renovating the guest house and adjacent buildings, work that is scheduled to be completed by the end of this month.
Hsu said the administration would post the bidding information online, with bidding set to take place in March. The contractor that wins the bid could run the guest house for 10 years.
The Lishan Guest House was opened to the public in 1969. At one point, the guest house was receiving as many as 500,000 visitors per year. Members of the Chiang family visit the guest house every summer.
The guest house was closed in 2004 after the Central Cross-Island Highway was devastated in the 921 Earthquake in 1999 and Typhoon Mindulle in 2004.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
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