Watchdog flags China education exchange gaps

Poorly regulated cross-strait academic exchanges have resulted in a lopsided flow of young Taiwanese going to China and numerous schools failing to register exchange activities, the Control Yuan said yesterday. An investigation found that the Ministry of Education and the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) failed to oversee educational exchanges with China, Control Yuan members Lin Wen-cheng (林文程) and Tien Chiu-chin (田秋堇) said in a statement, urging the agencies to address the shortcomings. The Chinese Communist Party has long regarded young Taiwanese as a major target of “united front” work, which has expanded from a focus on college students to elementary and high-school students, they said. Photo: Rachel Lin , Taipei Times Cross-strait educational exchanges have surged since a dip during the COVID-19 pandemic, Lin and Tien said. The number of Taiwanese college and university students who participated in cross-strait exchange programs increased to 5,745 last year from 2,196 in 2022, the Control Yuan members said, citing government data. The number of high-school and vocational high-school students visiting China as part of exchange programs increased to 1,161 from 676 during the same period, they said. The number of junior and elementary-school students surged from zero to 1,021 and from 38 to 1,045 respectively, they said. The number of faculty members accompanying such trips rose to 1,281 last year from 661 in 2022, Lin and Tien said. The number of Chinese students participating in MAC activities in Taiwan fell from 76 in 2022 to 16 last year, and most had backgrounds in the Communist Youth League of China, they said. Cross-strait academic exchanges have become extremely unbalanced under these conditions, they said. The investigation further revealed that an online registration platform for cross-strait educational exchange was not being used as intended. From 2019 to last year, authorities took action in 32 instances involving 19 activities because of reporting failures or other contraventions, the Control Yuan members said. Several institutions were serial offenders, they said, citing five occassions on which Tunghai University failed to register activities. When the omissions were discovered, some education providers cited unfamiliarity with the regulations, administrative errors or that they only helped publicize the activities, they said. The Ministry of Education has failed to enforce its rules governing Taiwanese educational institutions’ contact with China, the Control Yuan members said. Schools’ post-event reports on itineraries and activities were often perfunctory, undermining the reporting system’s purpose of detecting possible “united front” activity or itinerary changes, they said. Faculty members sometimes recruited students for exchange programs in China through messaging apps without their schools’ knowledge, they said. If students were caught in a natural disaster or other emergency in China, parents might discover that their schools had been unaware of exchange programs privately arranged by teachers, the Control Yuan members said. Schools must supervise staff-led activities to ensure authorities have accurate and complete information if something happens to students or teachers while they are in China, they said. Private groups outside school systems can recruit students for exchanges with Chinese entities without using the ministry’s registration platform, creating a regulatory blind spot, Lin and Tien said. The education ministry, the MAC and the Ministry of the Interior disagree over which agency is responsible for penalizing private groups if their activities breach the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), they said. That inaction is at odds with President William Lai’s (賴清德) instructions issued in March last year for the government to counter national security threats posed by China, they said. The cross-strait educational exchange registration mechanism must be enhanced to ensure exchanges are reciprocal, healthy and properly managed, they said. 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Taiwan achieved most-favored-nation status, so it had the lowest tariff rates among the four groups in the US sanctions regime, pays a non-cumulative 10 percent tariff and obtained exemptions for thousands of