About 50 members of a Filipino-Taiwanese group yesterday urged the government to grant them full-fledged citizenship, which they do not have despite being Republic of China (ROC) passport holders.
The members of the Concern Alliance for Filipino Chinese rallied outside the legislature, carrying signs and chanting slogans, such as “50 percent national,” to voice their dissatisfaction.
“Born and raised in the Philippines, these overseas Taiwanese do not carry the identification card that most ROC citizens have,” said Lorna Kung, a consultant for the alliance, who added that an identification card was a prerequisite to registering for national labor and health insurance.
Photo: CNA
The government has denied this group — labeled by the immigration law as “ROC nationals without citizenship” — identification cards since 1991, when it instituted tighter border controls.
The group said they are also required to apply for a visa to enter Taiwan, even though they are ROC passport holders.
“Why does an ROC national have to apply for a visa to enter the country? This is ridiculous,” Kung said.
Moreover, even after moving to Taiwan, these ROC passport holders must stay for seven years before they can apply for resident certificates and then wait another year before they can obtain identification cards, the alliance said.
It added that many of its members have to leave the country once every six months to maintain their legal residence status in Taiwan.
“We are Taiwanese. We are not foreigners,” some group members chanted.
They also urged lawmakers to pass amendments proposed by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), who joined the rally to show her support.
The amendments would eliminate the visa requirement for Filipino Taiwanese with ROC passports and reduce the period before being able to apply for resident certificates to three years.
According to a government report issued in January, of the more than 60,000 ROC nationals without citizenship, more than 2,000 are Filipino Taiwanese.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
COGNITIVE WARFARE: Allegations that the documents were proof that the former US envoy tried to smuggle alcohol were designed to manipulate public opinion Leaked documents related to customs clearance procedures for vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) that have been circulating on the Internet appear to be an attempt to manipulate public opinion against the government, a source said on Sunday. A post on online platform Baoliao Commune (爆料公社) on Sunday showed documents it said were evidence that Hsiao had smuggled alcohol through customs with the assistance of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and said that the documents were part of a 4GB data dump of confidential material acquired by hackers. In a rebuttal, the source said that they were not confidential documents, but rather