Radio Taiwan International
Date: 21 August, 2020
By: Leslie Liao

President of Taiwan’s Legislature Yu Shyi-kun says he hopes the Legislature’s second session of the year will begin earlier than usual. Yu says that pressing matters, like a third stimulus package for COVID-19 relief and constitutional reform, are on the Legislature’s docket.

All party caucuses must agree on an opening date for the Legislature’s sessions. In past years, the second session of the year has tended to begin at the end of September.   [FULL  STORY]

Taiwan Insight
Date: 21 August 2020 
By: Dorothy I-ru Chen.

Taiwan has always been an immigrate society. Immigrants from mainland China started to settle on the island as early as the 17th century. Starting from the 1990s, Taiwan experienced a new wave of immigration as marriages with women from China, and Southeast Asia (SEA) became increasingly common. Today, these female marriage-based immigrants reached more than half-million with the majority of them from China and SEA countries. Nevertheless, Taiwan remains to be a relatively ethnically homogeneous country. The recent official statistics show that more than 95% of Taiwan’s population is of the Han Chinese ethnicity.

The significant number of cross-country marriages brought the so-called ‘new immigrant children,’ ‘new Taiwanese children’ and ‘new resident children’ to public attention. Today, these children have been accounted for more than 10% of the student population at the compulsory education level. Among them, 43% of their mothers are from China, while the rest are mostly from SEA countries.

Even though a large number of these immigrants are from SEA, most people in Taiwan have a limited understanding of SEA countries. In the 1990s, the ex-President Lee Teng-hui tried to boost trade with the region by introducing the Southbound Policy without much success. However, due to large numbers of new immigrant children, along with the robust economic growth of ASEAN countries, and more than 700,000 SEA migrant workers currently working in Taiwan, the Taiwanese Government initiated the New Southbound Policy (NSP) in 2016. This was to enhance the cooperation between Taiwan and 18 other countries in Southeast Asia, South Asia and Oceania. Not surprisingly, education is one of the critical areas that the NSP addresses.

That being said, many educational initiatives have been implemented prior to 2016. One example is ‘the Torch Program,’ which was initiated by New Taipei City in 2008. With the support of private donations, the program made local primary schools the bases to support new immigrants societal integration. In 2012, the Central Government adopted this approach and launched ‘the National New Immigrants Torch Project’. Thus, schools with more than 10% or 100 new immigrant children were listed as ‘Schools for New Immigrant Children.’ Further, they were entitled to apply for family funds, counselling and visits, mother tongue learning and holding multicultural events.    [FULL  STORY]

China’s science and technology ministry promises big monthly wage to Taiwanese talent for ‘technical exchanges’

Taiwan News
Date: 2020/08/21
By: Ching-Tse Cheng, Taiwan News, Staff Writer

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — China's Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) on Friday (Aug. 21) announced a technical exchange program on its website, seeking to recruit 10 Taiwanese scientific researchers who will each receive a monthly salary of approximately NT$64,000 (US$2,180) if they participate.

According to the announcement, the priority funding areas of the "2020 Yong Taiwanese Scientists Exchange Program" include health, agro-ecology, and information technology. The program will be supervised by the MOST Office of Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan Affairs and administered by the Cross-Strait Tech and Information Exchange Center.

MOST claimed the program is designed to sponsor young Taiwanese scientists, scholars, and researchers for short-term scientific cooperation with Chinese institutions and corporations. It added the initiative could help develop talents from both sides and enhance cross-strait academic exchanges.

MOST said individuals who agree to participate in the program will engage in technical exchanges for no less than six months. Only 10 people will be recruited, reported ETtoday.
[FULL  STORY]

Focus Taiwan
Date: 08/21/2020
By: Wu Hsin-yun and intern Tzeng Yi-ning

Taipei, Aug. 20 (CNA) Taiwan's Forestry Bureau has added the green iguana to the country's list of animals that must be officially registered if they are to be raised and bred, amid concerns over the damage the lizards are doing to the environment when released into the wild.

In the updated list of animals to be registered that also included 13 native species and some non-native species, the Forestry Bureau described the green iguana as "exotic wildlife dangerous to the environment, people or animals."

Green iguanas have been introduced from Latin America as pets, but many owners have released them into the wild after being unable or unwilling to care for them.

Without predators, their numbers have quickly grown, causing agricultural losses and damaged roads and riverbanks, the Forestry Bureau said in explaining why it had to tighten regulations on breeding, raising and releasing the animals.    [FULL  STORY]

Taipei Times
Date: Aug 22, 2020
By: Lin Chia-nan / Staff reporter

3
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) yesterday said that China was lying when Beijing claimed that Taiwan had paid social media users to post negative comments on China-Kiribati relations.

China has received widespread criticism after images emerged online, showing Chinese Ambassador to Kiribati Tang Songgen (唐松根) walking across the backs of local children in a welcoming ceremony on its Marakai Island this month.

Tang accepted to participate in the ritual out of respect for local customs, Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Zhao Lijiang (趙立堅) told a news briefing on Thursday.

Tang is Beijing’s first ambassador to the Pacific Island nation after China and Kiribati resumed diplomatic relations in September last year.    [FULL  STORY]

Radio Taiwan International
Date: 20 August, 2020
By: Katherine Wei

Well-known fact: Taiwanese people love food. Lesser-known fact: Taiwanese people also waste a lot of food. The Environmental Protection Agency says that last year, up to 590,000 tons of food went to waste in Taiwan.

If you were to put all this into full-sized food waste bins and stack them on top of each other, they would reach the height of 13,500 Taipei 101s. Now, some people in the central county of Nantou have a good idea about how to put this wasted food to good use. 

What do you usually use for fertilizer? In several greenhouses in Zhushan, Nantou County, plants are flourishing and flowers are abloom. The people growing these beautiful plants have something special up their sleeves: they are a group of garbage collectors who use food waste as fertilizer. There’s no need to worry about the smell: the waste is drained of excess moisture, minced, and then fermented for three months until it becomes organic fertilizer. 

Zhushan’s garbage collectors say they are using the fertilizer to grow their own flowers. They have been decorating common spaces with these planters, even donating some to local schools.    [FULL  STORY]

Taipei must consider the possibility that Washington is using it as a pawn to frustrate Beijing. There is disturbing evidence that Trump considers relations with Taiwan expendable in the context of a deal he could make with China

South China Morning Post
Date: 21 Aug, 2020
By: Derek Grossman

On August 9, US Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar made a historic visit to Taiwan. Azar became the highest-ranking American cabinet official to travel to the island since 1979, which was when the United States dropped official diplomatic recognition of Taiwan in favour of communist China.Indeed, Azar’s visit should be celebrated by Taipei and Washington as it presents the latest evidence that bilateral relations are significantly strengthening – in this case, to better understand and handle the coronavirus pandemic. 

However, Taiwan should also view the US’ moves to bolster bilateral ties with some measure of trepidation. Simply put, the US’ objectives, in taking such unprecedented steps with Taiwan over the past few years, remain unclear.    [FULL  STORY]

Taiwan authorities name two hacking groups backed by China government — Taidoor and Blacktech

Taiwan News
Date: 2020/08/20
By: Sophia Yang, Taiwan News, Staff Writer

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Following an FBI alert about China-backed malicious cyber activity, Taiwan's Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau is warning of a threat from two hacking groups backed by the Chinese government and revealed a list of 11 domain names that government-linked agencies and businesses should block.

The bureau on Wednesday (Aug 19) suggested that Taidoor and Blacktech — two hacking groups linked to the Chinese government — have often infiltrated government agencies and their contracted information service providers. A poor network architecture resulting from insufficient investment in cybersecurity solutions makes them vulnerable to cyber attacks, it stated.

The hackers targeted loopholes in the systems of Taiwan government information service providers, and then sneaked into the remote desktop shared by government agencies to steal secrets or personal information. Government agencies have been asked to increase scrutiny of their service providers.    [FULL  STORY]

Focus Taiean
Date: 08/20/2020
By: Emerson Lim

Taipei, Aug. 20 (CNA) Taiwan's foreign ministry on Thursday responded to criticism from China and Somalia on the exchange of offices between Taiwan and Somaliland, slamming their promotion of the "one China principle" and "one Somalia principle."

On Monday, Taiwan opened a representative office in Somaliland, a self-declared state in East Africa, in fulfillment of an agreement signed between Taiwan and Somaliland in February.

However, the development has attracted the ire of China, which sees Taiwan as its territory, and Somalia, which has a similar view of Somaliland.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian (趙立堅) on Wednesday slammed the opening of the Taiwan Representative Office in Somaliland as promoting secessionism.
[FULL  STORY]

IN SPRING 2022: The museum said it is planning to hold a retrospective of the artist featuring 150 works it received from his California-based family

Taipei Times
Date: Aug 21, 2020
By: Sherry Hsiao / Staff reporter

The Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) has received a donation of 150 works by famed Taiwanese artist Hung Rui-lin (洪瑞麟), and it plans to stage an exhibition of his works in the spring of 2022.

Hung, who died in December 1996 at the age of 84, grew up in Taipei’s Dadaocheng (大稻埕) and went to Japan to study at the Teikoku Art School when he was 18, returning when he was 26.

For several years, he worked as a coal miner in Ruifang (瑞芳), in what is now New Taipei City, married a miner’s daughter, and later became famous for his works depicting the life of Taiwan’s miners.

The donation, made by the artist’s eldest son, Hung Chun-hsiung (洪鈞雄), includes 91 works featuring miners, 32 nude sketches, five portraits, eight landscapes, seven works the artist made while in Japan, and seven sketchbooks containing a total of 328 images, the museum said in a statement on Tuesday.    [FULL  STORY]