The city government will move to take over Wenmeng Building (文萌樓) by the end of next month if the owner does not meet its demands, Taipei City Department of Cultural Affairs Commissioner Liu Wei-gong (劉維公) said yesterday.
The former brothel in Taipei’s Datong District (大同) was a center of resistance to the city’s efforts to ban prostitution during the 1990s and is now the headquarters of the Collective of Sex Workers and Supporters.
Although designated a historical site in 2006, ownership has remained in private hands, leading to controversy since 2011 as the new owner has sought to expel the collective from the site. When required by the culture department to provide a detailed proposal for the preservation of the site, the owner responded by stalling, refusing to accept the official notification, the department said.
Photo: Hsieh Chia-chun, Taipei Times
The department said that it is now preparing to fine the owner between NT$100,000 and NT$500,000 for refusing to present the proposal, with an official announcement due next week. The owner then has a month to make changes before the site can officially be appropriated, the department said.
“If the site’s owner continues to reject the rules governing the operation of sites designated to be of historical significance, we plan to move forcibly to claim the site,” Liu said.
“This is necessary to demonstrate that value of cultural capital should not be viewed as a speculative opportunity," he said, adding that this was now the official policy of the city government, and the administration would move to make the appropriation process irreversible before the new city administration is sworn in.
In response, collective member Wu Juo-ying (吳若瑩) welcomed the commissioner’s comments, but said she would adopt a wait-and-see attitude because of past department foot-dragging.
She said the group is concerned that the site’s owner would find ways to drag out the decisionmaking process into next year, adding that the result of the group’s third and final appeal of a court order mandating its eviction was due at any time. The department has yet to take specific action after the owner missed its Oct. 3 deadline for the submission of new plans for site management, she said.
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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