President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said yesterday he was confident Taiwan would soon recover from the effects of the global financial crisis, not because of his leadership, but rather because of the Taiwanese.
“The people’s resilience and persistence can help us to bridge the difficulties,” Ma said during an address at a ceremony at Taipei Municipal Jianguo High School to mark the school’s 110th anniversary.
Ma said his administration would create about 300,000 jobs in the following four years, with the first 100,000 to be created within the next six months to reinvigorate the slumping economy, which has been affected by the global financial meltdown.
“We don’t expect Taiwan to emerge unscathed from this current global financial crisis, but we hope that Taiwan would at least tide over the difficulties without sustaining major harm, like it did the last Asian economic crisis [of 1997 and 1998],” Ma said.
He said that after fully guaranteeing deposits at all banks to stabilize the domestic financial market, the administration had proposed a four-year, NT$500 billion (US$15.2 billion) economic stimulus plan to pull Taiwan out of its economic rut.
The plan features extra funding for new and old infrastructure development projects and the distribution of shopping vouchers worth a total of about NT$80 billion aimed at encouraging consumption and reviving the suffering retail sector.
In related news, Ma said at a discussion with members of the business and industrial community in Pingtung County earlier in the day that his campaign “check” of allowing the Kaohsiung mass-rapid transportation system to expand southward to Pingtung County was not “a bounced check.”
“The development plan will be implemented once a more detailed assessment is completed,” Ma said.
The Coast Guard Administration (CGA) and Chunghwa Telecom yesterday confirmed that an international undersea cable near Keelung Harbor had been cut by a Chinese ship, the Shunxin-39, a freighter registered in Cameroon. Chunghwa Telecom said the cable had its own backup equipment, and the incident would not affect telecommunications within Taiwan. The CGA said it dispatched a ship under its first fleet after receiving word of the incident and located the Shunxin-39 7 nautical miles (13km) north of Yehliu (野柳) at about 4:40pm on Friday. The CGA demanded that the Shunxin-39 return to seas closer to Keelung Harbor for investigation over the
National Kaohsiung University of Science and Technology (NKUST) yesterday promised it would increase oversight of use of Chinese in course materials, following a social media outcry over instances of simplified Chinese characters being used, including in a final exam. People on Threads wrote that simplified Chinese characters were used on a final exam and in a textbook for a translation course at the university, while the business card of a professor bore the words: “Taiwan Province, China.” Photographs of the exam, the textbook and the business card were posted with the comments. NKUST said that other members of the faculty did not see
An apartment building in New Taipei City’s Sanchong District (三重) collapsed last night after a nearby construction project earlier in the day allegedly caused it to tilt. Shortly after work began at 9am on an ongoing excavation of a construction site on Liuzhang Street (六張街), two neighboring apartment buildings tilted and cracked, leading to exterior tiles peeling off, city officials said. The fire department then dispatched personnel to help evacuate 22 residents from nine households. After the incident, the city government first filled the building at No. 190, which appeared to be more badly affected, with water to stabilize the
The Taipei City Government yesterday said contractors organizing its New Year’s Eve celebrations would be held responsible after a jumbo screen played a Beijing-ran television channel near the event’s end. An image showing China Central Television (CCTV) Channel 3 being displayed was posted on the social media platform Threads, sparking an outcry on the Internet over Beijing’s alleged political infiltration of the municipal government. A Taipei Department of Information and Tourism spokesman said event workers had made a “grave mistake” and that the Television Broadcasts Satellite (TVBS) group had the contract to operate the screens. The city would apply contractual penalties on TVBS
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