On Friday night, more than 1,000 people gathered outside the legislature, flashlights in hand. Encircling the legislature and shining their lights at the compound, they called on the country’s lawmakers to overhaul the Referendum Law (公民投票法).
The demonstrators were there in support of Tsai Ting-kuei (蔡丁貴), chairman of the Taiwan Association of University Professors (TAUP), who was on day seven of a hunger strike intended to call attention to what he said were fundamental problems with that law as well as the legislative election system.
“Hand in hand, protect civil rights,” the protestors chanted. “Amend the Referendum [Law]. Safeguard Taiwan.”
PHOTO: LO PEI-DER, TAIPEI TIMES
In an interview with the Taipei Times, Tsai said it was a “feeling of powerlessness” that led him to adopt the approach of a hunger strike.
OPPOSITION
Tsai decided to stage the hunger strike during the Oct. 25 rally organized by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in opposition of the current administration’s cross-strait policies.
After the march ended, he began his hunger strike outside the legislature, without even telling his wife of his plan. Other TAUP members held a sit-in protest.
“I didn’t want to go home and wait for the next time I get a call to take to the streets again. The rally was a success but it was not enough, because the KMT always turns a deaf ear to us,” Tsai said.
“How much longer can we tolerate [President] Ma [Ying-jeou (馬英九)], who is about to capitulate to China?” he asked, referring to Ma’s statement that he hoped to sign a peace accord with China during his term.
AGREEMENT
As described by Ma in an interview with the India and Global Affairs quarterly, the peace agreement would come once economic relations with China have been normalized. This included normalizing direct air and sea links, which was on the agenda for the second round of cross-strait talks in Taipei this week.
In July, cross-strait charter flights were launched and the quota for Chinese tourists raised to 3,000 per day.
Tsai called Ma’s steps “clearly a timetable for Taiwan’s unification with China,” and added that this week’s visit by Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait Chairman Chen Yunlin (陳雲林) for the talks made amending the Referendum Law even more “imperative.”
The checks-and-balances system enshrined in the Constitution is being undermined, Tsai said, adding that the KMT had won an overwhelming majority in the legislature because of the “flaws” of the new electoral system, Tsai said.
CRITICISM
Tsai’s criticism centered on the “single district, two votes” system adopted for the legislative polls in January. Tsai said this resulted in disproportional results in terms of the population of each constituency compared with the votes received by each political party.
Under the new system, the KMT won 58.12 percent of the votes but won 81 seats of the legislature’s 113 seats, while the DPP’s 41.88 percent of the vote gave it just 27 seats.
Because of this imbalance, Tsai said the public must exercise its right to initiate referendums to veto Ma’s cross-strait policies, which he said were selling out national interests to Beijing.
The problem, he said, was that the plebiscite law was “toothless.”
Since the Referendum Law was promulgated in 2003, it has been dubbed a “birdcage” law by critics who said the thresholds for putting a referendum proposal on the ballot and passing it were excessively high.
To apply for a referendum, the signatures of 0.5 percent of all eligible voters in the most recent presidential election — approximately 80,000 — must be collected. An additional 5 percent of the population — appropriately 800,000 — must sign the petition before the referendum can be put to a vote.
For the results of the referendum to be considered valid, more than 50 percent of the electorate — approximately 8 million people — must vote on it.
“These unreasonable thresholds limit direct democracy and deprive the people of their right to decide the future of the country,” Tsai said.
Tsai’s voice was feeble.
During his hunger strike, he has only had water, refusing food, but has received intravenous nutrition.
The 60-year-old hydraulic engineering professor from National Taiwan University was sent to the hospital for a health examination after joining the 1,000 or so people at the rally in front of the legislature on Friday night in a wheelchair.
He then called off his hunger strike temporarily, and Wu Li-hui (吳麗慧), secretary-general of the TAUP, began her own.
Tsai promised to continue his hunger strike once his doctor allowed it, saying that he looked forward to seeing young and old people alike join in supporting reform.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching