After the Miaoli County Government delivered renewed demolition orders on the four remaining households in the farming village of Dapu (大埔), Jhunan Township (竹南), and set July 5 as the deadline for self-demolition, netizens are coordinating a resistance effort once the forced demolition begins.
“We have received an official notice from the Miaoli County Government asking us to tear down our homes by July 5, otherwise the county government will send a demolition squad to flatten our houses anytime after the deadline,” said Peng Hsiu-chun (彭秀春), a member of one of the households that received the notice last week.
“It doesn’t make sense to me that the county government is renewing the demolition orders while the legal process to confirm whether the previous order is legitimate is still ongoing,” Peng added.
Peng’s house, as well as the houses of Chu Shu (朱樹), Huang Fu-chi (黃福記) and Ko Cheng-fu (柯成福), are the last four on a plot of land set to be turned into a science park by the county government.
Over the past few years, residents in Dapu have staged numerous demonstrations and rallies against the county’s land seizure plan.
Although in 2010, the Executive Yuan, in a negotiation meeting presided over by Vice President Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) when he was premier, agreed to allocate farmland with irrigation systems to the affected families before taking over their lands, that decision was overturned by the Ministry of the Interior (MOI) last year.
Opposing the ministry’s decision, the four families that are still resisting filed administrative lawsuits against the county government.
Those lawsuits have yet to be resolved.
“We filed lawsuits because we want to confirm whether it’s legitimate for the interior ministry to overturn a decision made by the Executive Yuan. We’re still awaiting a verdict from the Taichung High Administrative Court,” said Thomas Chan (詹順貴), an attorney who represents Peng, Chu, Hung and Ko.
“I will file a request to the court, asking it to void the renewed demolition order on Monday,” Chan added.
Miaoli activist Lin Yi-fang (林一方) has launched a “Save Dapu on July 5” campaign on the Internet, asking netizens to join him to resist forced demolitions.
Hundreds of netizens have responded to the call, but the issue of what action to take is still being discussed.
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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