The recently formed Alliance of Justice and Fairness, or the pan-purple alliance, yesterday presented its population policy, proposing ways to deal with the aging population and encouraging the government to give more rights to the foreign wives of Taiwanese men.
The alliance warned the public that their retirement plans were being jeopardized by the declining birth rate.
Alliance spokesman Wu Chung-tai (
Wu also presented government figures showing that the proportion of people aged 65 and over was set to rise from 8.8 percent of the total population in 2001 to 10 percent in 2007 and to 20 percent by 2025.
"Soon, increasingly numerous elderly citizens will be without enough children to support them, and the country does not provide them with a sound pension and care system. [Ensuring] a dignified life in retirement will become a serious challenge," Wu said.
Alliance convener Chien Hsi-chieh (
"Having children should be everyone's basic right, but now many Taiwanese dare not have children because of their poor living standards and the lack of a social security network. The responsibility for child care falls mainly on families, yet private child care and education are expensive," Chien said.
The alliance also expressed its concerns over so-called foreign brides -- women from Southeast Asia and China who marry Taiwanese men.
The alliance said the first step to help these women should be to describe them as "new female immigrants" instead of "foreign brides."
They also appealed to the government to establish comprehensive immigration policies and set up a department of immigration to deal with issues such as employment, education and social welfare for the women and their children.
"Last year these new female immigrants made up 25.9 percent of the women who got married in Taiwan, and the children that were born to immigrants made up 12.46 percent of total newborns," said Wu Wei-ting (伍維婷), CEO of the Awakening Foundation (婦女新知基金會), a member of the alliance.
"However, the government considers these women the responsibility, or liability, of individual families and refuses to give them the rights to which they are entitled," she said.
Wu Wei-ting urged the government to cancel the unreasonable limitations on the work rights of such immigrants, saying they should be entitled to all the rights listed in the Labor Standards Law (
She also suggested that the problem of domestic violence that many of these women face should be dealt with separately. Furthermore, when they divorce their husbands, courts should not always give the children to the husbands and the government should help ensure that the women are given visitation rights if they lose custody of the children.
The alliance, which was founded earlier this month, consists of well-known social groups and seeks to highlight a number of social issues in the run-up to the presidential election next year.
TENSIONS: The Chinese aircraft and vessels were headed toward the western Pacific to take part in a joint air and sea military exercise, the Ministry of National Defense said A relatively large number of Chinese military aircraft and vessels were detected in Taiwan’s vicinity yesterday morning, apparently en route to a Chinese military exercise in the western Pacific, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) said. In a statement, the ministry said 36 Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) aircraft, including J-16 fighters and nuclear-capable H-6 bombers, crossed the median line of the Taiwan Strait or an extension of it, and were detected in the southern and southeastern parts of Taiwan’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ) from 5:20am to 9:30am yesterday. They were headed toward the western Pacific to take part in a
Honor guards are to stop performing changing of the guard ceremonies around a statue of Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) to avoid “worshiping authoritarianism,” the Ministry of Culture said yesterday. The fate of the bronze statue has long been the subject of fierce and polarizing debate in Taiwan, which has transformed from an autocracy under Chiang into one of Asia’s most vibrant democracies. The changing of the guard each hour at the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taipei is a major tourist attraction, but starting from 9am on Monday, the ceremony is to be moved outdoors to Democracy Boulevard, outside the eponymous blue-and-white memorial
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) supports peaceful unification with China, and President William Lai (賴清德) is “a bit naive” for being a “practical worker for Taiwanese independence,” former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said in an interview published yesterday. Asked about whether the KMT is on the same page as the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on the issue of Taiwanese independence or unification with China, Ma told the Malaysian Chinese-language newspaper Sin Chew Daily that they are not. While the KMT supports peaceful unification and is against unification by force, the DPP opposes unification as such and
CASES SLOWING: Although weekly COVID-19 cases are rising, the growth rate has been falling, from 90 percent to 30 percent, 14 percent and 6 percent, the CDC said COVID-19 hospitalizations last week rose 6 percent to 987, while deaths soared 55 percent to 99, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said yesterday, adding that the recent wave of infections would likely peak this week. People aged 65 or older accounted for 79 percent of the hospitalizations and 90 percent of the deaths, the majority of whom have or had underlying health conditions, CDC data showed. The youngest hospitalized case last week was a six-month-old, who was born preterm and was unvaccinated, CDC physician Lin Yung-ching (林詠青) said. The infant had a fever, coughing and a runny nose early this month, but