Taiwan News
Date: 2015-09-22
By: By Tseng Ying-yu and Jay Chen, Central News Agency

Taipei, Sept. 22 (CNA) China has given a “positive response” to Taiwan’s concerns over a new electronic card issued to Taiwanese visitors, Premier Mao Chi-kuo said Tuesday.

At the request of Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council, the Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) under China’s State Council clarified late Monday that all information stored in the card would be consistent with that on the passport-style document that it replaces, Mao told reporters.

The TAO has also said that the new card, which looks like a credit card with the bearer’s picture, will only be used for travel purposes, Mao said. The premier reiterated Taiwan’s hope that no new measures related to exchanges across the Taiwan Strait should be implemented until after a consensus is reached through full consultations between the two sides.

On Monday, Mao expressed Taiwan’s “extreme dissatisfaction” over the lack of discussions prior to China’s announcement that it would begin to issue the new card that day. The Chinese side notified Taipei of the new electronic card before a trial in July and its full implementation Monday without prior consultations, said Lin Chu-chia, deputy chief of Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council (MAC), the Cabinet agency responsible for relations with China.     [FULL  STORY]

Focus Taiwan
Date: 2015/09/22
By: Wang Hung-kuo and Lilian Wu

Taipei, Sept. 22 (CNA) A Thai laborer working at the Linkou Thermal Power Plant died in an industrial accident Tuesday.

The victim, named as Sombat, 46, fell from an 18-meter-high platform when he was installing a steel grating on a platform for a boiler as part of expansion work at the plant.

He was rushed to the Linkou Chang Gung Memorial Hospital, where efforts to resuscitate him failed.

Police were still investigating the cause of his death.

RICHARD BUSH:Heritage Foundation Asian Studies Center director Walter Lohman contradicted the former AIT chairman, saying talk of Taiwan would only be ‘pro forma’

Taipei Times
Date: Sep 23, 2015
By: William Lowther  /  Staff reporter in WASHINGTON

Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is likely to make Taiwan a “major issue” during his White House summit with US President Barack Obama this week, former American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) chairman Richard Bush said on Monday.

Obama should urge Xi to be “cautious” and avoid making a “sensitive issue worse” in China’s response to a possible Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) victory in the January elections, said Bush, who is now director for East Asia policy studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

There was a “good chance” that the DPP would come back to power, he said in a post on the Brookings Web site titled “The return of the Taiwan issue to US-China relations.”

Xi’s message to Obama was likely to be: “You Americans don’t realize the danger that the DPP and its presidential candidate, Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), pose. You need to do your part to contain what will become a bad situation,” Bush wrote.     [FULL  STORY]

Want China Times
Editorial
Date: 2015-09-22

Momentum in the development of relations between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait has ceased in the wake of last year’s student-led Sunflower Movement in Taiwan that galvanized local opposition to closer ties with China, with none of the cross-strait agreements on trade in services and in goods, the opening of reciprocal representative offices, or the planned oversight act for cross-strait agreements moving forward.

This is unlikely to change as Taiwan enters election season and we will have to wait at least until next May, when the country’s new president takes office, to see what direction relations with Beijing are likely to take.

But though no politician with any sense would want to touch them, there are major issues related to the cross-strait affairs which really should be addressed now and it would be welcome, if naively optimistic, to think that bipartisan efforts might be made to do so.

First, circumventing Taiwan’s mediating authorities on cross-strait affairs, the public security authorities of China’s Guangdong province last week sent an official notice directly to the Kaohsiung City Police Department’s Yancheng Precinct, “giving instructions” regarding an ongoing criminal case, a significant breach of the unofficial protocol.     [FULL  STORY]

Focus Taiwan
Date: 2015/09/22
By: Yang Shu-min and Evelyn Kao

Taipei, Sept. 21 (CNA) The Greenpeace on Monday recognized Taiwan for its decision to call back a fishing boat for illegally shark finning in the Pacific and to suspend its license between one month and one year pending on the results of coming investigation.

Fay Lee (李芳怡), a senior communications officer of Greenpeace East Asia, said however that Greenpeace discovered the illegally harvested shark fins on the Shuen De Ching No.888, were estimated to weigh 95kg, more than the 75kg previously estimated.

The Greenpeace said it discovered the shark fins were taken from at least 42 shark carcasses — though only three carcasses had been recorded in the ship’s log.

The shark species include blue shark, scalloped hammerhead, silky shark and porbeagle shark. Most of the sharks were listed on the IUCN red list of threatened species.     [FULL  STORY]