People living near Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport yesterday accused the government of rushing the review process for the Taoyuan Aerotropolis project, which they said was ill-conceived and had not incorporated any suggestions from civic groups.
The project covers an area of 6,859 hectares, of which 3,073 hectares are to be expropriated from private land owners.
The Taoyuan Aerotropolis Self-Help Association yesterday again questioned the necessity and public benefit of the forced expropriation plan, and called on lawmakers to freeze the project’s budget in today’s legislative session.
At a joint press conference in Taipei, Taipei National University of the Arts assistant professor Lu Wen-chung (呂文忠) showed a photograph taken by a surveillance camera of his late father, Lu A-yun (呂阿雲) — an 83-year-old farmer who killed himself by drinking pesticide on Nov. 9 — and said his father committed suicide because he could not bear the thought of being forced to leave his land and property.
Taiwan Rural Front spokesperson Tsai Pei-hui (蔡培慧) said that after the elderly farmer gave up his life to protest against the project, the Ministry of the Interior’s Construction and Planning Agency proceeded by holding 11 ad hoc specialist review meetings in 15 days — with very few committee members attending the meetings — as an apparent attempt to swiftly approve the project.
Questioning the necessity of expropriating their land when the aerotropolis’ new runway will not be designed and submitted for an environmental impact assessment until 2022, Taoyuan Educational Trade Union representative Peng Ju-yu (彭如玉) said that the Ministry of Transportation and Communications in 1999 expropriated 176 hectares of private land in Taoyuan’s Dayuan Township (大園) for the Taoyuan Air Services Zone program, but the planned park area is still deserted.
“A wrong investment may be worse than corruption,” Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Tien Chiu-chin (田秋堇) said at the press conference, urging her colleagues at the legislature to freeze funding for the project until the government can clarify questions about its public benefits and necessity.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift