Taiwan Today

Deputy Minister of Education Lin Tsong-ming confirmed Nov. 18 Taiwan will retroactively recognize academic degrees from 41 top mainland universities. Lin said the Ministry of Education has laid out three proposals regarding how far back to go in acknowledging mainland credentials. The first proposal is to accept mainland degrees obtained after the promulgation of the Act Governing Relations between Peoples of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area in 1992. The second proposal is to acknowledge mainland diplomas acquired after 1997 when former Education Minister Wu Jing announced the Rules Governing the Examination and Recognition of Mainland Diplomas. The third proposal is to recognize mainland credentials received after 1998 when the Control Yuan made a correction to the aforementioned rules and postponed their implementation. “The ministry is leaning toward the second proposal. But all three proposals will be submitted to the legislature at the same time. It is up to the legislature to decide which version to adopt,” Lin said. Roughly 20,000 Taiwan citizens hold mainland degrees and currently around 6,000 Taiwan students are studying in the mainland, according to statistics provided by the Taipei-based ChinaTide Association, an organization specializing in helping Taiwan students take entrance examinations for mainland universities. The association said Taiwan students have only been going to the mainland to study in the last 10 years or so. Whether the MOE goes back to 1992, 1997 or 1998, the rights of the great majority of those studying in the mainland will be protected. Chen Zheng-teng, currently a Ph.D. student at Peking University’s School of Government, said very few students had studied in mainland Chinese universities before 1997. “Most of them came after the 1997 rules were announced.” Chen preferred to have the recognition apply retroactively to 1992, when there were already related articles in the Act Governing Relations between Peoples of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area. In response to public opinion that the earliest group studying in the mainland should be punished, Chen argued that the MOE should not set a timeline on this issue. “Previous students were protected by law,” he said. “Taiwan businesspeople going to the mainland in the early days were the ones who actually violated the law, yet they have not been punished. There is clearly a double standard here,” he added. (LC-THN)