Despite the 2,800 tour buses rushing into Taipei City and hundreds of thousands of protesters marching on the streets yesterday, Taipei police and transportation officials reported smooth traffic after they took steps to avert chaos.
To ease the traffic flow, the Taipei City Police Department mobilized over 4,800 police officers and imposed traffic regulations on the ten parade routes that spilled across half of Taipei City. As of press time, city officials reported no traffic accidents, saying the mass protest closed on a peaceful note.
The Taipei Rapid Transit Corporation also reported an unprecedented load of up to half a million passengers by 4pm yesterday, a figure that is about 120,000 passengers more than usual holiday traffic.
Apart from adding 300 MRT police and volunteers to enforce crowd control, the MRT also added more trains to help people leave the city center.
Meanwhile, railway authorities said five additional express trains took 5,000 people from the south to Taipei yesterday.
"These passengers are expected to head back south around 7pm. We believe ten additional train runs will ease possible congestion," said the director of Taipei Main Station, Chiu Rong-hwa (
"As soon as the cars and tour buses can get out of Taipei City, there will be no jams on the Sun Yat-sun Freeway or the Second Freeway. There are only minor jams around highway stop areas," said the director-general of the Taiwan Area National Freeway Liang Yueh (
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
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