Thousands of people stood in line to make a “human chain” last night along Taipei’s Xinyi Road and turned on the flashlight applications on their smartphones at 8:14pm to show support for former Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) chairman Lin I-hsiung (林義雄), who was in the third day of a hunger strike against the construction of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant.
As the participants turned on the flashlights and pointed their mobile phones toward the sky, they started chanting: “Terminate the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in 2014.”
The time of the action was chosen to symbolize that the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Gongliao District (貢寮) must be terminated by the end of this year.
Photo: Lo Pei-der, Taipei Times
The campaign was organized by the DPP, which called for anti-nuclear activists to form a 2.4km-long human chain, which from the street across from the site of Lin’s hunger strike — Gikong Presbyterian Church — along Xinyi Road and which ended on Ketagalan Boulevard, where the Presidential Office Building is located.
The crowd chanted the slogan for about three minutes before moving toward Ketagalan Boulevard, where they gathered for a rally and sit-in, demanding that President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) to bow to mainstream public opinion and halt the construction.
DPP Chairman Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) and other party heavyweights, including former premiers Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) and Yu Shyi-kun, reiterated that the DPP was determined to phase out nuclear power and eventually achieve a nuclear-free homeland, a goal listed in the party’s charter.
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