Construction is finally complete on the Ministry of National Defense’s (MND) new headquarters, three years after it was scheduled to be finished.
Located in Taipei’s Dazhi (大直) area, the new headquarters is slated to open next month, replacing the rundown complex in the Boai Special District (博愛特區), which has a high concentration of government buildings, in downtown Taipei.
Construction on the new building began in 1996, taking 18 years to be completed, with 2011 set as the original target completion date.
The overall budget also ballooned to NT$15.8 billion (US$520 million), from the original cost of NT$13.3 billion — an increase of almost 19 percent.
According to a high-ranking military official who declined to be identified, the ministry last month budgeted an extra NT$40 million to set up a museum at the complex, adding that an architecture firm had been contracted for the museum’s layout, design and construction.
The source said the ministry had also allocated NT$830 million from the ministry’s fiscal budget to install hardware and software facilities, including a documentation and archives center, along with a library, for the new headquarters.
Ministry spokesman Major General David Lo (羅紹和) confirmed the plan, saying the ministry has a museum of military history, but it does not have a museum dedicated to the ministry’s history that guests from the nation’s allies can visit.
Lo said the new headquarters consists of the main ministry building — which has eight stories above ground and two stories below — as well as a logistics command building and a combined forces training center.
“In the underground levels, there is also an operations and intelligence center, with walls that are over 1m thick, which is designed to withstand chemical warfare or a nuclear attack,” he said.
He added that all the above-ground floors were built with re-enforced concrete materials and have armored structural protection, which render the complex capable of withstanding attack by rocket-launched grenades.
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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