A group of students and activists for justice yesterday launched the second stage of a 44-hour hunger strike, calling on lawmakers to revise legislation to address problems resulting from a widening gap between rich and poor.
The first stage of the hunger strike started at 10am on Sunday and ended yesterday morning without receiving any positive response from the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislative caucus or government officials.
One of the protesters’ demands was that the financial burden on people who repay their student loans be alleviated with changes to the regulations stipulated in the University Act (大學法), the Junior College Act (專科學校法), the Senior High School Act (高級中學法) and the Vocational School Act (職業學校法).
Photo: CNA
In response to the demands, Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Lin Shu-fen (林淑芬) has put forward four amendments, but the KMT caucus blocked them from being put on the legislative schedule.
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has laid down a blueprint for Taiwan’s “golden decade,” but we need to ask him “where the golden decade for young people is when the four amendments were unable to get into the legislature,” said Hsiao Hsiang-chun (蕭翔鈞), a representative of the protest group.
The government should increase education subsidies for economically disadvantaged students and emulate the student loan system adopted in advanced countries that allows students to repay their debt in line with their individual repayment capability rather then the system that requires borrowers to pay back a fixed amount each month regardless of their economic status, said Chen Fang-yu (陳方隅), another representative.
Film director Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢) voiced his support for the students, who staged their protest outside the front gate of the legislature.
Hou said he heard from a friend that a young person had committed suicide because of the pressure of paying back student loans.
“He just earned a doctorate and felt that he was unable to repay the loans,” he said.
“The causes of poverty are deep-rooted. For my generation, we were able to make a success of our careers as long as we worked hard and there were lots of job opportunities, but now it seems that all the opportunities go to people who are rich, have power or who are in advantaged positions,” Hou said.
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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