Following 15 months of preparation, the Daybreak Project, a 300,000-word English-language online interactive encyclopedia and oral history archive about the 2014 Sunflower movement, is to be officially launched on Friday.
Yesterday marked the fourth anniversary of the student-led protests in March and April 2014 against the then-Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government’s handling of a cross-strait service trade agreement.
The protesters occupied the Legislative Yuan’s main chamber in Taipei for almost 23 days and at one point stormed the Executive Yuan building, with thousands of supporters participating in public rallies nationwide in a show of solidarity with those in the chamber.
Compiled by Taiwan Foundation for Democracy fellow Brian Hioe (丘琦欣), the project is to be available to the public for free online and includes more than 50 interviews with key players in the Sunflower movement, including Lin Fei-fan (林飛帆), Chen Wei-ting (陳為廷), a breakaway group called the “Jianmin Liberation Zone” (賤民解放區) and the Alliance of Referendum for Taiwan.
“The project is in part an attempt to understand the confluence of social forces which led to the explosion of the Sunflower movement, in part an attempt to track the complex subjective motivations which undergirded participation in the movement and lastly an attempt to record recent history before it becomes lost,” Hioe wrote on the project’s Web site.
“The Sunflower movement has been a pivotal event thus far in the history of Taiwan in the 21st century and it deserves to be recorded in history in as detailed a manner as possible,” he said, adding that the project welcomes outside contributions.
The “subjectivities underlying participants of the Sunflower movement prove a valuable record of the unfolding and continued development of Taiwanese identity in the 21st century,” Hioe said.
Hioe, Lin and other leaders of the movement this week traveled to the University of California at Berkeley to participate in a two-day symposium titled “Sunflowers and Umbrellas: Social Movements, Expressive Practices, and Political Culture in Taiwan and Hong Kong.”
Yangmingshan National Park authorities yesterday urged visitors to respect public spaces and obey the law after a couple was caught on a camera livestream having sex at the park’s Qingtiangang (擎天崗) earlier in the day. The Shilin Police Precinct in Taipei said it has identified a suspect and his vehicle registration number, and would summon him for questioning. The case would be handled in accordance with public indecency charges, it added. The couple entered the park at about 11pm on Thursday and began fooling around by 1am yesterday, the police said, adding that the two were unaware of the park’s all-day live
Yangmingshan National Park’s Qingtiangang (擎天崗) nature area has gone viral after a park livestream camera observed a couple in the throes of intimate congress, which was broadcast live on YouTube, drawing large late-night crowds and sparking a backlash over noise, bright lights and disruption to wildlife habitat. The area’s livestream footage appeared to show a couple engaging in sexual activity on a picnic table in the park on Friday last week, with the uncensored footage streamed publicly online. The footage quickly spread across social media, prompting a tide of visitors to travel to the site to “check in” and recreate the
Fast food chain McDonald's is to raise prices by up to NT$5 on some products at its restaurants across Taiwan, starting on Wednesday next week, the company announced today. The prices of all extra value meals and sharing boxes are to increase by NT$5, while breakfast combos and creamy corn soup would go up by NT$3, the company said in a statement. The price of the main items of those meals, if ordered individually, would remain the same. Meanwhile, the price of a medium-sized lemon iced tea and hot cappuccino would rise by NT$3, extra dipping sauces for chicken nuggets would go up
Minister of Digital Affairs Lin Yi-ching (林宜敬) yesterday cited regulatory issues and national security concerns as an expert said that Taiwan is among the few Asian regions without Starlink. Lin made the remarks on Facebook after funP Innovation Group chief executive officer Nathan Chiu (邱繼弘) on Friday said Taiwan and four other countries in Asia — China, North Korea, Afghanistan and Syria — have no access to Starlink. Starlink has become available in 166 countries worldwide, including Ukraine, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam, in the six years since it became commercial, he said. While China and North Korea block Starlink, Syria is not