Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) on Saturday vowed to transform the city’s Nangang District (南港) into a biotech hub.
Ko made the remark at an event to promote the city government’s “East District Gateway Project,” which involves the linking of Nangang and Hsinchu County via a new high-speed rail route, shortening the trip between the two areas to 35 minutes.
Ko said that the business sector in Nangang benefits from the presence of Academia Sinica and the Food and Drug Administration, and, with the help of the eight biotech parks in Taipei, the region is well set to become the center of the biotech industry in northern Taiwan.
“In the future, Nangang will lead biotech research and development, thereby streamlining efforts with production lines at Hsinchu Science Park,” Ko said.
The MRT’s Wenshan-Neihu Line and Banciao-Nangang Line both pass through the area, providing Nangang with convenient transportation links to Taipei’s biotech parks, he said.
The Taipei City Government has signed a memorandum of understanding with Academia Sinica, which is scheduled to open the National Biotechnology Research Park next year, Ko said.
Joint efforts would help Nangang become a hub for clinical tests, he said.
The event took an unexpected turn after residents were given the floor to express their opinions, when Lin Yi-chun (林怡君), an activist opposing the demolition of the Nangang Bottle Cap Factory, got on stage.
The now defunct factory dates back to the Japanese colonial era and faces demolition due to pressure from a group of landowners — most notably Chunghwa Telecom and the National Property Administration — who want to transform the site into a commercial district.
Referring to a plan to build a 10m-wide road, which would result in damage to a former office building in the compound, Lin called on city officials to scrap the project, saying that it will not help improve traffic.
She also expressed her gratitude to Ko for promising to drop the road construction late last month.
Taipei Department of Land Commissioner Lee Te-chuan (李得全), who spoke after Lin, rejected her assertion that Ko had promised to scrap the road’s construction, saying the mayor merely agreed to “seek alternatives.”
Lee said that the department would meet with civic groups and landowners with ties to the project today to discuss possible solutions and decide on a resolution on Wednesday.
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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