President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) proposed setting up a hotline with Beijing yesterday to ensure food safety and public health in Taiwan.
Ma said China’s milk producers should be condemned for making tainted milk powder and that while they were drastic measures, he supported the Executive Yuan’s effort to request compensation from Chinese milk firms and to recall Chinese-made milk powder and vegetable proteins.
“In the long run, the government must have a sound understanding of China’s food safety and consumer protection mechanisms and set up a hotline to obtain information from China,” he told members of the Taiwan Medical Association at the Presidential Office.
Ma said the former Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration had allowed the import of milk products from China, but that as a responsible government the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) administration would take up the responsibility of protecting the health of the Taiwanese public.
“I would like to remind civil servants around the country that it is the responsibility of the government to address the public’s concerns,” he said. “We must deal with it, not walk away from it, because it is our duty to protect the public’s health.”
Describing the scandal as “something beyond our control,” Ma said the government must handle the matter calmly and practically.
Meanwhile, Straits Exchange Foundation Secretary-General Kao Kong-lian (高孔廉) said yesterday he had met members of China’s Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait to discuss the scandal and other issues.
Kao, who returned from Macau yesterday, said he conveyed Taiwan’s concern over the incident and the hope that China would offer assistance. He also hoped that experts from both sides could work together to tackle the problem.
DISCONTENT: The CCP finds positive content about the lives of the Chinese living in Taiwan threatening, as such video could upset people in China, an expert said Chinese spouses of Taiwanese who make videos about their lives in Taiwan have been facing online threats from people in China, a source said yesterday. Some young Chinese spouses of Taiwanese make videos about their lives in Taiwan, often speaking favorably about their living conditions in the nation compared with those in China, the source said. However, the videos have caught the attention of Chinese officials, causing the spouses to come under attack by Beijing’s cyberarmy, they said. “People have been messing with the YouTube channels of these Chinese spouses and have been harassing their family members back in China,”
The Central Weather Administration (CWA) yesterday said there are four weather systems in the western Pacific, with one likely to strengthen into a tropical storm and pose a threat to Taiwan. The nascent tropical storm would be named Usagi and would be the fourth storm in the western Pacific at the moment, along with Typhoon Yinxing and tropical storms Toraji and Manyi, the CWA said. It would be the first time that four tropical cyclones exist simultaneously in November, it added. Records from the meteorology agency showed that three tropical cyclones existed concurrently in January in 1968, 1991 and 1992.
GEOPOLITICAL CONCERNS: Foreign companies such as Nissan, Volkswagen and Konica Minolta have pulled back their operations in China this year Foreign companies pulled more money from China last quarter, a sign that some investors are still pessimistic even as Beijing rolls out stimulus measures aimed at stabilizing growth. China’s direct investment liabilities in its balance of payments dropped US$8.1 billion in the third quarter, data released by the Chinese State Administration of Foreign Exchange showed on Friday. The gauge, which measures foreign direct investment (FDI) in China, was down almost US$13 billion for the first nine months of the year. Foreign investment into China has slumped in the past three years after hitting a record in 2021, a casualty of geopolitical tensions,
‘SOMETHING SPECIAL’: Donald Trump vowed to reward his supporters, while President William Lai said he was confident the Taiwan-US partnership would continue Donald Trump was elected the 47th president of the US early yesterday morning, an extraordinary comeback for a former president who was convicted of felony charges and survived two assassination attempts. With a win in Wisconsin, Trump cleared the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch the presidency. As of press time last night, The Associated Press had Trump on 277 electoral college votes to 224 for US Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party’s nominee, with Alaska, Arizona, Maine, Michigan and Nevada yet to finalize results. He had 71,289,216 votes nationwide, or 51 percent, while Harris had 66,360,324 (47.5 percent). “We’ve been through so
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