Opposition party urges crackdown on Chinese products

This article was published by the Taiwan Headlines on March 22, 2006. It features a recent demonstration organized by the opposition Taiwan Solidarity Union, whose participants demanded that the government should set up a task force to crack down low-quality products imported from China.

Lawmakers from the Taiwan Solidarity Union are concerned that many inferior Chinese products have invaded Taiwan's markets. These include towels, baby cribs, cotton swabs, kneepads, T-shirts, batteries and disposable chopsticks. According to these lawmakers, many of the Chinese products are of low quality and made illegally. Some of them are even toxic. Since such products have affected the daily lives of the people in Taiwan, the government should take a decisive move and ban them.

According to officials from the Bureau of Standards, Metrology and Inspection under the Ministry of Economic Affairs, although the ministry has preformed random checks on some imported Chinese products, it does not have sufficient manpower to examine all of them.

The Ministry of Economic Affairs has about 300 inspectors, who have seized more than 5,000 items and fined 33 companies a total of NT$532 million (US$16.4 million). The ministry plans to work more closely with customs officials in order to crack down on illegal products.