Residents affected by a proposed road expansion in Taoyuan yesterday protested outside the Ministry of the Interior, demanding hearings on alternative plans to reduce land appropriation.
About five owners of property along Longgang Road (龍岡路) in Taoyuan’s Jhongli District (中壢) protested with several advocates and members of supporting groups, shouting slogans against an “unreasonable” proposed 30m expansion of the road.
They also smashed two “flower vases” in a move symbolizing new hearing procedures proposed by the ministry, playing on a common Mandarin metaphor for things that are ornamental but useless.
“We are not totally opposed to the road expansion, but our hope is that it would be 24m wide [instead of 30m] to leave more land for our homes — right now the Taoyuan City Government is calling for a median strip and sidewalks,” said Lee Tzu-chiang (李自強), a member of a self-help association.
While the protesters conceded that their homes would be demolished, they said that “losing an additional 3m will greatly impinge on our living space after reconstruction.”
Construction to double the number of road lanes is aimed at reducing congestion between Jhongli and Bade (八德) and Pingjhen (平鎮) districts.
An earlier phase of construction completed in July expanded a neighboring section of the road to 30m, including 3.5m-wide sidewalks.
Residents maintain that the congestion is not serious, while questioning the utility of the expansion given that the enlarged road would be sandwiched between sections only 12m wide.
They said the city had refused to engage in serious discussions over alternative plans, or publicize data such as traffic figures.
“The city government has not even been willing to provide its feasibility report to residents, and when we asked the Ministry of the Interior, it referred us back to the city government,” said Tien Chi-feng (田奇?), a consultant to the self-help association, urging the ministry to force public hearings on the city’s plans.
Any land appropriation by city governments must be approved by the ministry, with Minister of the Interior Yeh Jiunn-rong (葉俊榮) last year promising to implement new public hearing protocols to ensure procedural justice.
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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