The group of student protesters who have been staging a "hunger strike" in front of the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial said early yesterday morning that they ended their strike as planned but would continue protesting.
Rejecting President Chen Shui-bian's (
"We made the time and conditions under which we wished to meet President Chen clear from the very beginning of our protest. For him to suddenly say that he has no time and suggest an alternate date indicates a lack of integrity and sincerity," said Chen Cheng-feng (
The protesters originally demanded that Chen meet them before yesterday. In response, Chen suggested a two-hour-long meeting in public tomorrow.
"We are ending the hunger strike because we need to consider the physical well-being of our members," Chen Cheng-feng said.
"The next step of our movement focuses on interacting with the people and encouraging them to join our sit-down protest. We are going to bring in more student protesters, and communicate with the public about our demands," he said.
The group's 20-odd members have been encamped at the memorial since April 2 and had been taking turns fasting for 12 hours at a time.
The group did not participate in the rally held yesterday by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and People First Party (PFP), saying that they had no political affiliations and thus no reason to join in. They expressed anger that the pro-blue camp had used images of them in newspaper ads for yesterday's rally and demanded that the PFP-KMT alliance apologize.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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