The last representative at the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office (TECO) in Hong Kong is set to leave before his visa expires next week, a source said on Tuesday.
Last month, seven of the office’s eight remaining Taiwanese staff were ordered to leave the territory after their work visas were not renewed, leaving only Economy Division Director Ni Po-chia (倪伯嘉).
With his visa set to expire on Friday next week, Ni has bought a plane ticket so that he can return to Taiwan before then, a source with knowledge of the matter said.
The Hong Kong government has since July 2018 ordered TECO section leaders to sign an affidavit recognizing Beijing’s “one China” principle when applying for a work visa, but they have all refused, resulting in the forced return of 11 Taiwanese staffers since last year.
The rule extends to director-level staff at the Hong Kong offices of the Taiwan External Trade Development Council and the Tourism Bureau.
The lease on TECO’s 40th-floor office in Tower One of the Lippo Centre in Admiralty reportedly ends this month.
Starting on Aug. 2, the Service Division is to share the National Immigration Agency’s (NIA) 11th-floor office in the same building, TECO announced on its Web site.
The lease on the NIA’s office, which mainly handles visas for Hong Kong and Chinese applicants, reportedly ends in December.
After that, the Service Division and the NIA are planning to relocate to the Ministry of Culture’s Kwang Hwa Information and Culture Center in Wan Chai, which has a lease until March 2023.
TECO’s other divisions and local staff are to move to the Kwang Hwa center this month.
In a report published earlier this month on Hong Kong’s 24 years since being handed back to China, the Mainland Affairs Council said that territory officials have been deeply dissatisfied with the Taiwan-Hong Kong Services and Exchanges Office, which helps Hong Kongers move to Taiwan.
Since the office’s creation last year, the Hong Kong government has been increasingly reticent to hold economic or cultural exchanges, the report said.
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
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Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching