Government Information Office (GIO) Minister Pasuya Yao (
"Chinese reporters' stories do not help communication because they report rumors instead of facts," Yao said.
"As a result, we will cooperate with the MAC to suspend their application to establish bureaus in Taipei," he said.
The MAC said yesterday afternoon that it will follow the GIO's policy initiative on this issue.
`Facts not rumors'
At the Legislative Yuan yesterday morning, the GIO chief claimed that the two agencies' reporters said in their stories on the March 26 rally against the "Anti-Secession" Law that "all the participants in the rally must keep their hands out of their pockets or they will be regarded as assassins and knocked down by special agents."
"We need facts to be distributed instead of rumors," Yao said.
"China is not a free country and its news agencies are not being operated without control," Yao said.
"Under these circumstances, we need to think carefully about whether we should be allowing them [Chinese reporters] to base their operations in Taipei," he said.
"We need to let them [Chinese officials] know that Taiwan is not a country which will always answer to every request of theirs," Yao said.
Reconsider
Asked when the government will reconsider the Chinese reporters' requests to be based in Taiwan, Yao said that it was up to the reporters.
"As long as they [Chinese reporters] can promise they will always report truthfully on Taiwan and report facts about what happens on the ground, we will be more than happy to assist," the minister said.
"However, the final decision will not be made without MAC's and the National Security Council's evaluation of the situation," he added.
The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday said it is fully aware of the situation following reports that the son of ousted Chinese politician Bo Xilai (薄熙來) has arrived in Taiwan and is to marry a Taiwanese. Local media reported that Bo Guagua (薄瓜瓜), son of the former member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, is to marry the granddaughter of Luodong Poh-Ai Hospital founder Hsu Wen-cheng (許文政). The pair met when studying abroad and arranged to get married this year, with the wedding breakfast to be held at The One holiday resort in Hsinchu
The Taipei Zoo on Saturday said it would pursue legal action against a man who was filmed climbing over a railing to tease and feed spotted hyenas in their enclosure earlier that day. In videos uploaded to social media on Saturday, a man can be seen climbing over a protective railing and approaching a ledge above the zoo’s spotted hyena enclosure, before dropping unidentified objects down to two of the animals. The Taipei Zoo in a statement said the man’s actions were “extremely inappropriate and even illegal.” In addition to monitoring the hyenas’ health, the zoo would collect evidence provided by the public
A decision to describe a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement on Singapore’s Taiwan policy as “erroneous” was made because the city-state has its own “one China policy” and has not followed Beijing’s “one China principle,” Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Tien Chung-kwang (田中光) said yesterday. It has been a longstanding practice for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to speak on other countries’ behalf concerning Taiwan, Tien said. The latest example was a statement issued by the PRC after a meeting between Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財) and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on the sidelines of the APEC summit
A road safety advocacy group yesterday called for reforms to the driver licensing and retraining system after a pedestrian was killed and 15 other people were injured in a two-bus collision in Taipei. “Taiwan’s driver’s licenses are among the easiest to obtain in the world, and there is no mandatory retraining system for drivers,” Taiwan Vision Zero Alliance, a group pushing to reduce pedestrian fatalities, said in a news release. Under the regulations, people who have held a standard car driver’s license for two years and have completed a driver training course are eligible to take a test
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