Police squads from the Taipei City Police Department’s Xinyi Precinct in the early hours of yesterday evacuated a handful of Taiwan Tree Protection Union environmental activists, who had been camping outside the Farglory Dome’s proposed site for four months to protest against the construction project, with some accusing the police of vandalizing and illegally seizing some of their equipment.
Up to 50 officers reportedly approached the tents set up outside the site, as the environmentalists, who were operating in shifts, were ordered to gather their equipment and leave.
“At around 2am, the police dragged us away from where we were. There were 50 of them and only five of us. We were totally outnumbered,” union member Pan Han-chiang (潘翰疆) said.
Photo: Chiu Chun-fu, Taipei Times
“They confiscated some of our equipment, such as a cutout of [Taiwanese-Japanese actor] Takeshi Kaneshiro and several signs carrying the ‘anti-corruption of others’ slogan, which is a satire directed at the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT).”
Netizens jokingly dubbed Kaneshiro the “patron saint of trees,” hoping he would bring the same luck as a red cedar under which he was filmed for an airline commercial. That tree subsequently received special attention from a Japanese horticulturist, who restored it to its upright position shortly after it was uprooted by typhoon Matmo in July.
“It was almost dawn when about 30 of our members successfully reclaimed what rightfully belonged to us at the Sanjhangli police station, after an hour-long feud with the officers, who threatened to detain us under the Social Order Maintenance Act (社會秩序維護法),” he said.
He said that the protesters’ items were either missing or broken, such as a golden axe made of cardboard, meant to mock Farglory Land Development Co’s readiness to cut down trees for construction, which was broken in half.
“The police even took away one of our cameras, which we installed over safety concerns,” he said.
He said that Farglory has been giving them more trouble since chairman Chao Teng-hsiung (趙藤雄) was released on bail late last month for allegedly bribing former Taoyuan County Deputy Commissioner Yeh Shi-wen (葉世文) to secure a public housing project in the county.
“They may think that now they have banned us from camping on the site, we will leave. But we are here to stay,” he said.
When reached for comment, Xinyi Precinct Chief Huang Chi-tse (黃啟澤) denied that the police had evacuated the environmentalists, but said that they were enforcing the law due to overwhelming complaints about the activists camping on the sidewalk.
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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