Farmers from Tamsui District (淡水) in New Taipei City (新北市) yesterday protested against a town project proposed by the Construction and Planning Agency (CPA) on concerns that, in addition to forced land seizures, the project could damage the local environment.
“I live in a small house with a small plot of land attached to it. I grow vegetables on the land for my own consumption,” a local land owner in her 60s, Su Shu-yuan (蘇淑媛), said at a news conference at the legislature. “I don’t live a fancy life, but I’d say my life is good — what am I going to do if you [the government] take away my land?”
She said that, in order to keep her land, she has expressed her opposition to the land expropriation in letters to the Presidential Office, the CPA, the Control Yuan, the Ministry of the Interior and the New Taipei City Government, “but none of them seemed to really care about what I asked for.”
Photo: Wang Yi-sung, Taipei Times
“I know you are trying hard to convince us, but I am absolutely opposed to the project. Don’t even think about taking my land. I want to live the way I’ve always lived,” she added.
Su, as well as thousands of other homeowners in the area, are in a panic because the second phase of the Tamhai New Town (淡海新市鎮) project is to undergo a final review next month, and land expropriations could start as soon as the project is approved.
The Tamhai New Town project is an urban planning project first proposed in 1992 to create a new town using 1,756 hectares of land — covering as many as six farming villages — north of central Tamsui to relocate 300,000 people from the overcrowded Taipei metropolitan area.
After 20 years of development, the first phase of the project has been completed on 446 hectares. However, while the first-phase area was designed for 130,000 people, only 13,000 have moved in so far.
The second phase of the project, on the other hand, covers 1,168 hectares of land — which includes 871.33 hectares of farmland that is mostly still being used for agricultural production.
Huang Jui-mao (黃瑞茂), an associate professor in Tamkang University’s Department of Agriculture, called the second phase a “lie.”
“Despite investments made in the past 20 years, the majority of housing units are still unsold, while as many as three-fourths of the land in the first phase of the new town project is still unoccupied,” he said. “How could you move on to the second phase now, especially as the surface area of the second phase is much larger than the first?”
He added that, as food shortages are becoming a global concern and food self-sufficiency is a problem in Taiwan, “why would you take over farmland on the edge of a metropolitan area for development?”
Huang Tsung-chuan (黃宗傳), a local farmer, raised doubts about traffic and environmental issues.
“Tamsui is connected to Taipei via a narrow strip. The traffic is already very bad now, how can we handle another 300,000 residents?” Huang said. “The government wants to build an elevated expressway through the mangrove forest along the Tamsui River [淡水河], but this is going to severely damage the mangrove ecosystem.”
CPA Director-General Yeh Shih-wen (葉世文), who appeared at the press conference, said he would raise residents’ concerns in the review meeting.
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