The Taipei Department of Rapid Transit Systems should conduct a strict review of the Chinese firm chosen to be the supplier of automatic door systems for the MRT Circular Line, Taipei City Councilor Vincent Chao (趙怡翔) said yesterday.
French company Alstom, which is to supply trains for the line, selected China’s Nanjing Kangni (南京康尼機電) for the door systems, although the company has never worked in Taiwan and has a spotty safety record, Chao said.
Nanjing Kangni is based in Nanjing, China, and its largest shareholder is a Chinese state-owned enterprise. It has multiple records of safety incidents in other locations.
Photo: Tu Chien-jung, Taipei Times
In late 2019 and January 2020, train doors on the New York City subway opened while trains were in motion, forcing 298 trains to stop running.
A similar incident occurred in March 2023 on the Dalian Metro’s fifth line in China.
After the incident in New York, a US senator questioned whether Chinese state-backed capital in the US railway system posed a national security threat, the Democratic Progressive Party councilor said.
The city government should carefully review the investment process and strengthen requirements for contractors’ self-management, he said.
The Taipei City Government can require winning bidders to be responsible for subcontractors, but ultimately bears final oversight responsibilities, lawyer Chin Jui-yun (秦睿昀) said.
According to Article 11 of National Security Act (國家安全法), businesses from China, Hong Kong and Macau cannot work on defense facilities, but the MRT is not classified as such a facility, Chin said.
To address the root issue using legislation would require that the MRT, railways and high-speed rail be classified as part of defense-related infrastructure, he said.
The contract stipulated that the general contractor supplying cars for the new line could not be Chinese, but there was no such regulation for subcontractors, the department’s Electrical and Mechanical Design Division said.
Ultimately the bid must be reviewed by the city government and only after passing testing can production start, although the case has not yet been submitted, it said.
Taiwanese can file complaints with the Tourism Administration to report travel agencies if their activities caused termination of a person’s citizenship, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said yesterday, after a podcaster highlighted a case in which a person’s citizenship was canceled for receiving a single-use Chinese passport to enter Russia. The council is aware of incidents in which people who signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of Russia were told they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, Chiu told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Taipei. However, the travel agencies actually applied
Japanese footwear brand Onitsuka Tiger today issued a public apology and said it has suspended an employee amid allegations that the staff member discriminated against a Vietnamese customer at its Taipei 101 store. Posting on the social media platform Threads yesterday, a user said that an employee at the store said that “those shoes are very expensive” when her friend, who is a migrant worker from Vietnam, asked for assistance. The employee then ignored her until she asked again, to which she replied: "We don't have a size 37." The post had amassed nearly 26,000 likes and 916 comments as of this
New measures aimed at making Taiwan more attractive to foreign professionals came into effect this month, the National Development Council said yesterday. Among the changes, international students at Taiwanese universities would be able to work in Taiwan without a work permit in the two years after they graduate, explainer materials provided by the council said. In addition, foreign nationals who graduated from one of the world’s top 200 universities within the past five years can also apply for a two-year open work permit. Previously, those graduates would have needed to apply for a work permit using point-based criteria or have a Taiwanese company
The Shilin District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday indicted two Taiwanese and issued a wanted notice for Pete Liu (劉作虎), founder of Shenzhen-based smartphone manufacturer OnePlus Technology Co (萬普拉斯科技), for allegedly contravening 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) by poaching 70 engineers in Taiwan. Liu allegedly traveled to Taiwan at the end of 2014 and met with a Taiwanese man surnamed Lin (林) to discuss establishing a mobile software research and development (R&D) team in Taiwan, prosecutors said. Without approval from the government, Lin, following Liu’s instructions, recruited more than 70 software
RSS