The Ministry of the Interior should force Taoyuan Aerotropolis project officials to take into account the results of public hearings, campaigners said yesterday, saying data showing demand for project housing was misleading.
“While the construction deadline for the plan should ideally not have been extended, we realize that would be extremely difficult to force in practice, so our major is hope is that the ministry will force a real substantial review,” Taiwan Association for Human Rights housing specialist Lin Yen-tung (林彥彤) said, adding that the decision of a ministry Construction and Planning Agency committee last week to conditionally extend the three-year construction plan was “acceptable.”
The project’s construction deadline would have otherwise expired yesterday amid continued controversy over the scope of land appropriation needed for the project, the largest in the nation’s history.
Plans center around an “egg-yolk” airport expansion to build a new runway for the Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport, with campaigners criticizing surrounding “egg-white” development plans that they say include “excessive” land appropriation.
They had called for the current construction plan to be allowed to expire to allow the passage of a previous version, which had substantially less land appropriation.
Campaigners have said that government officials have failed to change plans in response to public hearings last year.
Land appropriation could be shrunk by 200 hectares if the unrealistic overestimation of future housing needs in the area were adjusted, Lin said.
“They made a mistake in estimating housing needs based on household numbers, because they failed to take into account declining birth rates and family sizes, which would reduce housing needs,” he said, calling for the estimate to be based on projected population figures and average housing needs per person, rather than per household.
This would reduce the project area to about 400 hectares, which is available without any additional land appropriation or reallocation, he said.
Other campaigners have questioned the need for additional runway construction given the recent decline in Chinese tourist numbers.
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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