Greater Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chiu (陳菊) is seeking to meet with Minister of Economic Affairs Shih Yen-hsiang (施顏祥) over an unconfirmed government plan to have a controversial Kuokuang Petrochemical Technology Co (國光石化) plant established in the city, an official said yesterday.
“We [the Greater Kaohsiung government] do not welcome the Kuokuang Petrochemical plant. To build an oil refinery does not fit with the direction in which the city has been moving over the years, which is to develop an environment-friendly city with green and clean industries,” the city’s Information Bureau -director--general Lai Jui-lung (賴瑞隆) said by telephone.
Lai said the city government was not consulted by the ministry before a media report disclosed that Beishan Village (北汕) in Linyuan District (林園) was being considered as an alternative location for the project that has aroused concerns over its environmental impact on wetlands along the coast of Dacheng Township (大城) in Changhua County.
It would be unfair if the Kuokuang project were moved to Kaohsiung as this city “has taken too much of the brunt of the country’s development in the past,” Lai said, referring to the city being developed as a center for heavy and petrochemical industries.
“The development of heavy industry made Greater Kaohsiung one of the world’s highest polluters in terms of carbon dioxide emissions per capita,” Lai said.
Lai said the central government should not force the city to go back to its ways when the former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) administration and former city mayor Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) were in power, as that would counteract its efforts in recent years to develop a low-carbon and sustainable metropolis.
If the government decided to move the Kuokuang project to Greater Kaohsiung, it would only prove the truth of the allegation that the KMT has been “favoring the north over the south,” Lai said.
Lai dismissed a media report that quoted an anonymous source as saying that residents in Beishan Village planned to appeal to the Executive Yuan to welcome the Kuokuang project on the condition the government relocate the village and its neighboring villages.
“Our understanding is that residents there are opposed to the Kuokuang project,” Lai said.
The Environmental Protection Administration has scheduled a meeting on Thursday for its environmental impact assessment (EIA) committee to review the environmental impacts of the project on the Dacheng Township site. The project has failed to pass EIAs in the previous four meetings over the past five years, the latest one being on Jan. 27.
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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