Borough wardens participating in trips partly funded by Beijing would only have contravened a ban on group tours to China if they had used travel agencies to organize the tours, Minister of Transportation and Communications Wang Kwo-tsai (王國材) said yesterday.
Wang made remarks after the Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper) yesterday reported that nearly 30 percent of 456 Taipei borough wardens participated in group tours to China partly funded by the Chinese government.
National security officials have said Beijing is using these tours to interfere in next month’s presidential and legislative elections.
Photo: CNA
“It is not the Ministry of Transportation and Communications’ responsibility to determine whether the Chinese Communist Party has used these tours to influence the outcome of Taiwan’s elections. However, as the current policy bans group travel to China, any borough warden would have contravened the ban if they had asked travel agencies to arrange tours for them,” Wang told reporters before attending a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Transportation Committee.
The Tourism Administration would investigate whether travel agencies had contravened the ban, Wang said.
However, the government does not ban individuals from traveling to China, nor would it intervene in the tour arrangements of any solo traveler, he said.
The transport ministry last month announced that the ban on group travel to China would be lifted on March 1 next year, when Chinese group tours to Taiwan would be allowed.
The number of tourists traveling to China would be capped at 2,000 people per day, and the same cap would be imposed on Chinese tourists visiting Taiwan, although Wang has assured travel agents that the cap could be adjusted depending on demand.
Separately, Chunghwa Post yesterday told the Transportation Committee that by the end of June next year it aims to resume transshipment of packages from China to other countries.
The state-run postal service on Nov. 7 announced that it would suspend its transshipment service for packages from China. The decision was made after three employees from a care facility in South Korea in July reported that they were experiencing dizziness and having trouble breathing after opening a package from China shipped by Chunghwa Post.
While reviewing Chunghwa Post’s budget plan, Democratic Progressive Party legislators Lin Chun-hsien (林俊憲) and Ho Hsin-chun (何欣純) asked when the transshipment service would be resumed given that it has been almost six months since the incident occurred.
They also asked whether the company is able to identify packages that contain suspicious items.
“We are aiming to resume the transshipment service by the end of June next year. Most packages delivered through the transshipment service come from China. Goods delivered through the service would not be filtered and sorted and would be shipped directly to their final destinations. We hope to communicate with China Post as we review the process to inspect packages,” Chunghwa Post president Chiang Jui-tang (江瑞堂) said.
Chunghwa Post chairman Wu Hong-mo (吳宏謀) said that the company needs to address three key issues before the transshipment service can resume.
“First, we must determine the responsibilities of forwarders regarding the goods they accept from China. Second, we must decide how inspections should proceed if we begin inspecting packages delivered using the transshipment service. Third, we should consider what postal services in the countries where packages arrive should do to handle packages transshipped through Taiwan,” Wu said.
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