The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislative caucus yesterday blasted the Tainan City Government for an underground railway project, which it said led to a local woman’s suicide.
The woman, surnamed Tseng (曾), 65, was hospitalized after she was found to have swallowed a cocktail of detergents on Friday last week. She died in hospital.
The woman’s daughter told reporters that her mother had been emotionally unstable because she was worried that her property might be expropriated to make way for a project to move the city’s railway underground.
Photo: Lin Liang-sheng, Taipei Times
KMT caucus deputy secretary-general William Tseng (曾銘宗) told a news conference in Taipei that the project was approved during Premier William Lai’s (賴清德) term as Tainan mayor, blaming the woman’s death on Lai’s handling of the project.
The woman’s home is part of a complex where several buildings have been torn down to make way for the project, and the integrity of her home could have been compromised, William Tseng said.
He compared the incident to the Miaoli County Government’s demolition of four houses in Dapu Borough (大埔) in 2013, after which one of the property owners committed suicide, sparking public outrage.
The Tainan City Government rejected the testimony of the dead woman’s daughter and said that her death was irrelevant to the project, which is irresponsible and indifferent, William Tseng said.
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is always talking about promoting “land justice” and should match its words with actions, he said.
The DPP should not apply double standards on land justice, KMT Legislator Ko Chih-en (柯志恩) said.
She underlined controversial land expropriations in Pingtung County in connection with an urban renewal project, which met with fierce protests in Taipei this week.
Land justice in the eyes of the DPP only applies to projects that have star activists from the Taiwan Rural Front and well-known documentary directors on site, but not to the Tainan and Pingtung projects, which are lesser known, Ko said.
KMT Legislator Arthur Chen (陳宜民) said that the DPP should heed the slogan it coined at the time of the Dapu incident: “The government tore down the houses in Dapu today. We will tear down the government tomorrow,” saying that it might come true.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift