Following the forced demolition of two houses owned by the Wang (王) family in Taipei’s Shilin District (士林), the Taipei City Government has been criticized for its approach to urban renewal programs. Numerous protests have also erupted over other cases of land expropriation. In light of these incidents, serious thought needs to be given to the issue at their core, namely, how best to define public interest.
The public interest is an abstract and indeterminate legal concept. It should be formed and expressed through rigorous administrative processes in which information is freely available and members of the public have a chance to participate. In other words, public interest is a consensus that is arrived at through fair and open participation, communication and discussion.
In pursuit of the public interest, most advanced democracies have abandoned the traditional model in which a minority of experts had a monopoly on policymaking. Instead, they actively encourage public participation.
This reflects the acceptance of various knowledge systems, like traditional knowledge, and value choices, such as the idea that one’s land is one’s home. This more inclusive approach justifies and rationalizes the public interest.
In contrast, Taiwan has long been used to authoritarian rule. Our government and institutions have a cast-iron grip on decisions involving the public interest. As a result, scant attention is paid to the decision-making process — a state of affairs that hasn’t changed since the Martial Law era ended in 1987.
The government in Taiwan has long been in the habit of acting arbitrarily, forming and executing plans as it sees fit in pursuit of economic growth and efficiency.
Those plans could be operational, like the fourth phase of the National Science Council’s Central Taiwan Science Park; town plans, such as the one in Ji-an Township (吉安) in Hualien County; or land expropriation plans, like the compulsory purchase of farmland at Dapu Village (大埔), Miaoli County and Puyu (璞玉) and Erchongpu (二重埔) in Hsinchu County. They could also be plans for the reassignment of urban land, such as the site of the Nantun (南屯) Catholic church in Greater Taichung, or urban renewal plans like the Wenlin Yuan (文林苑) development in which the Wangs’ house was demolished.
The system gives the public little opportunity to participate and even when they can, it is just done to fulfill legal requirements and has very little real meaning. The Administrative Procedure Act (行政程序法) became law in 1999. Originally, it was supposed to mimic similar French and German laws by incorporating legally binding planning procedures. Later, however, the government deleted most of the relevant clauses on the grounds that Taiwan’s administrative system and culture were very different from those of France and Germany.
Although the Ministry of Justice later drafted regulations in this regard, the government and associated institutions remained unwilling to cede their powers. As a result, public participation remains no more than an empty slogan. When ordinary people are excluded from the process and find their constitutional rights being violated or denied, they naturally take to the streets to protest such unjust treatment.
Given the failings of the current system, it is important that legally binding planning procedures be incorporated into the relevant laws, so that all the people whose interests are affected can take part. The introduction of meaningful public hearings would allow all parties concerned to work out between them where the public interest lies.
Hsu Shih-jung is a professor in the Department of Land Economics at National Chengchi University.
Translated by Julian Clegg
The image was oddly quiet. No speeches, no flags, no dramatic announcements — just a Chinese cargo ship cutting through arctic ice and arriving in Britain in October. The Istanbul Bridge completed a journey that once existed only in theory, shaving weeks off traditional shipping routes. On paper, it was a story about efficiency. In strategic terms, it was about timing. Much like politics, arriving early matters. Especially when the route, the rules and the traffic are still undefined. For years, global politics has trained us to watch the loud moments: warships in the Taiwan Strait, sanctions announced at news conferences, leaders trading
Eighty-seven percent of Taiwan’s energy supply this year came from burning fossil fuels, with more than 47 percent of that from gas-fired power generation. The figures attracted international attention since they were in October published in a Reuters report, which highlighted the fragility and structural challenges of Taiwan’s energy sector, accumulated through long-standing policy choices. The nation’s overreliance on natural gas is proving unstable and inadequate. The rising use of natural gas does not project an image of a Taiwan committed to a green energy transition; rather, it seems that Taiwan is attempting to patch up structural gaps in lieu of
The saga of Sarah Dzafce, the disgraced former Miss Finland, is far more significant than a mere beauty pageant controversy. It serves as a potent and painful contemporary lesson in global cultural ethics and the absolute necessity of racial respect. Her public career was instantly pulverized not by a lapse in judgement, but by a deliberate act of racial hostility, the flames of which swiftly encircled the globe. The offensive action was simple, yet profoundly provocative: a 15-second video in which Dzafce performed the infamous “slanted eyes” gesture — a crude, historically loaded caricature of East Asian features used in Western
Is a new foreign partner for Taiwan emerging in the Middle East? Last week, Taiwanese media reported that Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Francois Wu (吳志中) secretly visited Israel, a country with whom Taiwan has long shared unofficial relations but which has approached those relations cautiously. In the wake of China’s implicit but clear support for Hamas and Iran in the wake of the October 2023 assault on Israel, Jerusalem’s calculus may be changing. Both small countries facing literal existential threats, Israel and Taiwan have much to gain from closer ties. In his recent op-ed for the Washington Post, President William
RSS