About a year ago, a well-known media figure wrote an article in which she commented that while it took authoritarian China just four years to build a high-speed railway stretching well over 1,000km, in democratic Taiwan the Xinzhuang (新莊) metro line, which is less than 20km long, has been under construction for over 10 years, but is still not finished. These remarks drew a lot of response, with many people voicing their support.
A year after the article was published, a fatal crash occurred on the high-speed rail on the outskirts of Wenzhou (溫州) in Zhejiang Province, and now the Xinzhuang MRT Line faces a crisis over the possibility of landslides. In light of these developments, the pundit’s comments now seem somewhat ironic.
One thing the governments of Taiwan and China have in common, no matter whether they be authoritarian or democratic, is that they both have a preference for highly technological, highly efficient and large-scale development and projects to spur economic growth. The logic of the pundit’s comments suggests the question: “Why can’t Taiwan compare with China in terms of efficiency?” Evidently the commentator sees development as the only thing that really counts. She offers no critique of the many absurd consequences of prioritizing construction above everything else.
A dozen or more years ago, the Taipei City Government’s Department of Rapid Transit Systems (DORTS) chose the grounds of the decades-old Lo-sheng (Happy Life) Sanatorium (樂生療養院) as the site for a depot at the western end of the Xinzhuang Line. Although the sanatorium’s residents objected, their voices went unheard.
After construction began, in order to speed up progress on the project and despite the sanatorium’s value as a historical monument having come to light, DORTS continued to push ahead with construction. No account was taken of various proposals put forward by the Council for Cultural Affairs to preserve all or part of the sanatorium. DORTS’ attitude and actions aroused a great deal of public anger.
Later, under pressure from public opinion, the central government started to think about how to preserve buildings at Losheng Sanatorium. Residents and experts said that parts of the sanatorium had started subsiding after construction work for the depot began. They suspected that the location had from the start been unsuitable for large-scale excavation so they petitioned the Cabinet to avoid a possible tragedy by relocating the depot.
Unfortunately, DORTS refused to do so or to admit that there were any geological dangers. The central government, keen to extinguish the controversy, chose to ignore the results of detailed research it received. Consequently, construction of the subway depot went ahead, cutting into the slopes and leading to today’s worries about a possible landslide.
For many years, people have blamed DORTS for the problems of the Xinzhuang depot, saying that the department has been arrogant and obstinate. However, we should look back and ask ourselves who made this government department behave in such an arrogant and obstinate manner.
Is it not society’s unrelenting demand for “speed” and “efficiency” that pushed DORTS to press ahead with construction, even in the face of protests from experts and the community, and caused it to bypass the qualities most important and central to large-scale public construction projects, namely the well-being and safety of the public?
The purpose of technology should be to solve problems in people’s lives, but modern society’s insatiable demand for development and growth has led to a situation where a railway — which ought to benefit the public — is instead causing the underprivileged to suffer. The MRT — which ought to transport people safely — now threatens them with the danger of a landslide.
It is reported that over the past year, as DORTS digs away regardless of the danger, thousands of cracks have appeared in the ground and Losheng Sanatorium buildings adjoining the MRT depot. To begin with, DORTS covered up surface cracks with concrete, but when the concrete cracked again — and faced with strong protests from the sanatorium director and student activists — it appointed specialist technicians to do a survey. However, even before their report was finished, excavation began again in earnest.
How are the sanatorium residents, who have had to keep protesting just to survive this far, supposed to withstand such constant mental torture? Other people living in Xinzhuang eagerly await the completion of the metro line, hoping it will relieve traffic jams, but will their hopes be dashed by a disaster much worse than traffic congestion?
From the case of the Losheng Sanatorium, we see the cracks in the structure of a society in which development takes priority over everything else. Whether we can mend these cracks will depend on whether we can learn from this painful experience and rethink developmentalist construction that has scant regard for human beings.
Can we learn to make friends with the environment and be humble in the face of nature? Will we learn to respect the rights of underprivileged people? If not, no matter how bright and shiny modern urban civilization appears, if it always necessitates forcing the underprivileged to move and disregards risks such as landslides, then sooner or later trains will be crushed and people killed in a disaster that should have been foreseen.
Hsia Hsiao-chuan is a professor and director of the Graduate Institute for Social Transformation Studies at Shih Hsin University.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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