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.”
The first global hotel Keys Selection by the Michelin Guide includes four hotels in Taiwan, Michelin announced yesterday. All four received the “Michelin One Key,” indicating guests are to experience a “very special stay” at any of the locations as the establishments are “a true gem with personality. Service always goes the extra mile, and the hotel provides much more than others in its price range.” Of the four hotels, three are located in Taipei and one in Taichung. In Taipei, the One Key accolades were awarded to the Capella Taipei, Kimpton Da An Taipei and Mandarin Oriental Taipei. Capella Taipei was described by
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INDUSTRY: Beijing’s latest export measures go beyond targeting the US and would likely affect any country that uses Chinese rare earths or related tech, an academic said Taiwanese industries could face significant disruption from China’s newly tightened export controls on rare earth elements, as much of Taiwan’s supply indirectly depends on Chinese materials processed in Japan, a local expert said yesterday. Kristy Hsu (徐遵慈), director of the Taiwan ASEAN Studies Center at the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research, said that China’s latest export measures go far beyond targeting the US and would likely affect any country that uses Chinese rare earths or related technologies. With Japan and Southeast Asian countries among those expected to be hit, Taiwan could feel the impact through its reliance on Japanese-made semi-finished products and