Business leaders yesterday urged the government to heed the call for a legal mechanism to monitor its negotiations with foreign countries so it can end the stalemate over the cross-strait service trade agreement.
The plea came after student-led activists occupied the legislature on Tuesday last week to protest the perceived attempts of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers to push through the pact without a clause-by-clause review.
“The students should stop their protest after successfully alerting the public to the importance of procedural justice in legislative reviews,” Chinese National Federation of Industries (CNFI) chairman Rock Hsu (許勝雄) told a press conference.
Ruling and opposition lawmakers should seek to iron out their differences in a rational manner to avoid having the legislature in constant paralysis, CNFI and 50 other trade groups said in a joint statement.
Hsu voiced regret that while Taiwan repeatedly slips into political standoffs, trade rival South Korea keeps exporting electronic products, films and TV programs.
The business groups suggested the government bow to public opinion and set up a legislative panel to supervise trade talks with foreign nations.
“We believe an open and transparent policymaking process is the best way to resolve resistance and build social consensus,” the groups said.
By doing so, the government could better facilitate the signing of further pacts with China under the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA), joining talks for the Trans-Pacific Partnership and becoming a member of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, the statement said.
Chinese National Association of Industry and Commerce vice chairman Nelson Chang (張安平) said it was the government’s duty to make its policies clear and win public support for them, but he and others could not sit around and watch the protests escalate.
While sympathetic to the students’ complaints, Chang threw his support behind the trade pact, saying it would benefit 90 percent of local companies and force the remaining 10 percent to upgrade.
“It makes no sense to give up benefitting the 90 percent because a few may get hurt,” Chang said.
The groups warned against students’ call for nationwide strikes, saying that would exact a heavy toll, causing losses of about NT$120 billion (US$3.92 billion) per day in the manufacturing and service sectors, while foreign buyers could shift orders and ask for compensation if local firms fail to deliver goods on time.
Liya Chu (朱如茵), whose parents are New York-based Taiwanese restaurateurs, has been crowned the champion of US television cooking competition MasterChef Junior, after wowing the judges, including celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, with a feast of fusion cuisine. In the finale of the show’s eighth season, broadcast on Thursday, Chu walked away with US$100,000 after serving a spread of spiced duck breast with scallion pancakes and miso eggplant, followed by coconut pandan panna cotta with a passion fruit coulis and sesame tuille. Chu, who was 10 years old at the time of filming three years ago, faced off against then-11-year-old Grayson Price from
A university student has gained the spotlight for an interactive map he designed detailing all of China’s military bases and installations throughout the Indo-Pacific region. Soochow University music student Joseph Wen (溫約瑟), who calls himself an amateur military enthusiast, said he created the map to “help people better understand the cross-strait situation.” Wen originally posted the map online on June 14 last year, but it gained greater attention after he mentioned it during an appearance on a China Television talk show. On the show, Wen said he had gathered information on the locations from publicly available Web sites, as
GLOBAL STRATEGY: Indo-Pacific alliances need reinforcement to prevent Chinese occupation of Taiwan, which would threaten Japan, Hawaii and Australia, Pompeo said The US should officially recognize Taiwan as a free, independent nation and establish official diplomatic ties, former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo told an event at the Hudson Institute in Washington on Friday. Every US president since Harry Truman has considered Taiwan’s existence to be of utmost importance to US national security, Pompeo said. Taiwan is a principal US partner in technology and economic matters, and if China were to capture Taiwan’s semiconductor supply chain, it would severely hamper the US economy, Pompeo said. Should China occupy Taiwan, it would severely weaken US influence in the Indo-Pacific region and its surrounding areas,
Opening-day ticket sales for a horror exhibition at the Tainan Art Museum were suspended twice on Saturday as the show attracted too many visitors. Titled “Ghosts and Hells: The Underworld in Asian art,” the exhibition runs until Oct. 16. It is the local version of a show that debuted at the Musee du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris. It was planned and curated by Julien Rousseau. The Tainan museum said that within an hour of its doors opening, more than 1,000 people had entered the exhibition. By noon, 3,000 physical and virtual tickets had been sold, while the museum had more than 4,000
RSS