During the past presidential election, I proposed making Greater Taichung Taiwan’s second capital. I suggested the first step would be moving the Legislative Yuan there.
In democratic countries, sovereignty lies in the hands of the people. The legislature is Taiwan’s highest government body and should reflect that fact. However, its location is worth discussing, and should not descend into debates about whether legislators are acting out of self-interest when they propose a change of venue. I convened a cross-party committee to plan the move, to oversee issues such as the new location, the design, the allocation of the relocation budget and the actual construction.
The Legislative Yuan is currently located in the former grounds of a Japanese colonial-era high school. Apart from costing more than NT$100 million (US$3.38 million) in annual rent, its current location is actually illegal, as the grounds should be allocated for a school. Relocation becomes not a matter of whether we should do it, but how.
Another consideration is that Taiwan’s national government agencies are all in the Taipei City area, which is vulnerable to nuclear disasters. After the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant disaster in Japan, the Tokyo and Osaka governments started transferring some of Japan’s major national-level functions to Osaka to make it a “backup capital.”
The Taipei Basin would be affected by a disaster at the Jinshan Nuclear Power Plant in Shihmen District (石門) or the Guosheng Nuclear Power Plant in Wanli (萬里) — both in New Taipei City (新北市) — or even the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant in Ma-anshan (馬鞍山), Pingtung County.
Aside from these concerns, a shortage of land in Taipei, as well as overcrowding, high housing costs and constraints on the quality of life are also good reasons to relocate.
Relocating government departments would place less stress on Taipei, but doing so for many government departments would be relatively complicated and problematic, not least because it would involve also relocating many civil servants.
The Legislative Yuan, however, consists of only 113 individual legislators. Also, legislators should be serving people throughout Taiwan, so the move to Greater Taichung would make sense. In addition, the Legislative Yuan only meets for about six months of the year and, with the exception of government officials who might have to go there twice a week to answer questions, legislators would not have to be tied to its location.
Even more important is the issue of rezoning national land. Taiwan has yet to address the problem of uneven development, which has caused differential development between the northern, central, southern and eastern areas, as well as an increasing urban-rural gap. Rational discussion between legislators and various sectors of society is needed to find the best possible way of reaching the greatest and most beneficial consensus on how to use the relocation of the Legislative Yuan to bring about more balanced national development.
By moving the Legislative Yuan, it would be possible to come up with ways to develop national land that benefit everyone as well as to implement government renewal. Future government agencies could also be established in areas outside Taipei. The High Speed Rail has already made one-day business trips around the nation possible, effectively making Taiwan a city-state with Greater Taichung as its city center. New times call for new ways of thinking and new action. This is the only way Taiwan can experience new development.
Lin Chia-lung is a Democratic Progressive Party legislator.
Translated by Drew Cameron
The conflict in the Middle East has been disrupting financial markets, raising concerns about rising inflationary pressures and global economic growth. One market that some investors are particularly worried about has not been heavily covered in the news: the private credit market. Even before the joint US-Israeli attacks on Iran on Feb. 28, global capital markets had faced growing structural pressure — the deteriorating funding conditions in the private credit market. The private credit market is where companies borrow funds directly from nonbank financial institutions such as asset management companies, insurance companies and private lending platforms. Its popularity has risen since
The Donald Trump administration’s approach to China broadly, and to cross-Strait relations in particular, remains a conundrum. The 2025 US National Security Strategy prioritized the defense of Taiwan in a way that surprised some observers of the Trump administration: “Deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority.” Two months later, Taiwan went entirely unmentioned in the US National Defense Strategy, as did military overmatch vis-a-vis China, giving renewed cause for concern. How to interpret these varying statements remains an open question. In both documents, the Indo-Pacific is listed as a second priority behind homeland defense and
Every analyst watching Iran’s succession crisis is asking who would replace supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Yet, the real question is whether China has learned enough from the Persian Gulf to survive a war over Taiwan. Beijing purchases roughly 90 percent of Iran’s exported crude — some 1.61 million barrels per day last year — and holds a US$400 billion, 25-year cooperation agreement binding it to Tehran’s stability. However, this is not simply the story of a patron protecting an investment. China has spent years engineering a sanctions-evasion architecture that was never really about Iran — it was about Taiwan. The
For Taiwan, the ongoing US and Israeli strikes on Iranian targets are a warning signal: When a major power stretches the boundaries of self-defense, smaller states feel the tremors first. Taiwan’s security rests on two pillars: US deterrence and the credibility of international law. The first deters coercion from China. The second legitimizes Taiwan’s place in the international community. One is material. The other is moral. Both are indispensable. Under the UN Charter, force is lawful only in response to an armed attack or with UN Security Council authorization. Even pre-emptive self-defense — long debated — requires a demonstrably imminent
RSS