Chinese reporters are agents of the Chinese Communist Party, and the government should institute stricter regulations covering those posted to Taiwan, a Taiwan Thinktank consultant said on Saturday.
Chinese President Xi Jingping (習近平) on Feb. 19, 2016, said that reporters’ work must uphold the spirit of the party, which means that Chinese reporters are agents of the Chinese government, Taiwan Thinktank consultant Tung Li-wen (董立文) said on Saturday, one day after two reporters from China’s Fujian Province-based Southeast Television had their accreditation revoked and were expelled.
Ai Kezhu (艾珂竹) and Lu Qiang (盧薔) had allegedly produced a talk show in Taiwan, which contravened the regulations governing their work here.
Photo: Peter Lo, Taipei Times
The pair protested the decision to expel them, saying that Southeast Television has been operating in Taiwan for 12 years, and all of its staffers in Taiwan had complied with Taiwanese laws.
China and Taiwan have different understandings about the functions of the media, and the government must clearly delineate those functions through strict regulations for Chinese reporters, Tung said.
The expelled reporters had understood Taiwanese laws when they contravened the conditions of permits to report from Taiwan, he said.
The Taiwan Thinktank was founded by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in December 2001.
“The media enjoy freedom of
the press in Taiwan, but the government does not allow news agencies to broadcast fake news,” said Chen Ming-chi (陳明祺), who served as deputy minister of the Mainland Affairs Council from July 2, 2018, until May this year, before returning to his former post as a National Tsing Hua University assistant professor of sociology.
Since the greatest threat to Taiwan’s democracy today is from China, it is no longer possible to protect the nation’s democracy by merely preventing abuses of power, Chen said.
The council’s decision to call for the two reporters to be expelled was the right move, as it demonstrated the nation’s resolve to protect its democracy, Chen said.
Cross-Strait Policy Association deputy secretary Chang Yu-shao (張宇韶) said that he had appeared on a Southeast Television program, but much of what he had said had been edited out before the program was broadcast.
No academics whose stance on cross-strait policies was in line with that of the DPP had ever been invited to the talk show program, he said.
“It was just one-sided attacks on the DPP,” he said.
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
Taiwan plans to cull as many as 120,000 invasive green iguanas this year to curb the species’ impact on local farmers, the Ministry of Agriculture said. Chiu Kuo-hao (邱國皓), a section chief in the ministry’s Forestry and Nature Conservation Agency, on Sunday said that green iguanas have been recorded across southern Taiwan and as far north as Taichung. Although there is no reliable data on the species’ total population in the country, it has been estimated to be about 200,000, he said. Chiu said about 70,000 iguanas were culled last year, including about 45,000 in Pingtung County, 12,000 in Tainan, 9,900 in
DEEPER REVIEW: After receiving 19 hospital reports of suspected food poisoning, the Taipei Department of Health applied for an epidemiological investigation A buffet restaurant in Taipei’s Xinyi District (信義) is to be fined NT$3 million (US$91,233) after it remained opened despite an order to suspend operations following reports that 32 people had been treated for suspected food poisoning, the Taipei Department of Health said yesterday. The health department said it on Tuesday received reports from hospitals of people who had suspected food poisoning symptoms, including nausea, vomiting, stomach pain and diarrhea, after they ate at an INPARADISE (饗饗) branch in Breeze Xinyi on Sunday and Monday. As more than six people who ate at the restaurant sought medical treatment, the department ordered the
ALLEGED SABOTAGE: The damage inflicted by the vessel did not affect connection, as data were immediately rerouted to other cables, Chunghwa Telecom said Taiwan suspects that a Chinese-owned cargo vessel damaged an undersea cable near its northeastern coast on Friday, in an alleged act of sabotage that highlights the vulnerabilities of Taipei’s offshore communications infrastructure. The ship is owned by a Hong Kong-registered company whose director is Chinese, the Financial Times reported on Sunday. An unidentified Taiwanese official cited in the report described the case as sabotage. The incident followed another Chinese vessel’s suspected involvement in the breakages of data cables in the Baltic Sea in November last year. While fishing trawlers are known to sometimes damage such equipment, nation states have also