Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

Tsai should deliver on her pledges

Taipei Times Editorial

Since Wednesday last week, a group of volunteers has been taking turns staging a hunger strike in a park facing the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) headquarters in Taipei to urge the DPP government to pass draft amendments to the Referendum Act (公民投票法).

Led by the People Rule Foundation, the participants, many coming to Taipei from across the nation despite the rain and low temperatures, are taking part in the “nonviolent protest” in the hope of contributing their efforts toward the consolidation of the nation’s democratic achievements.

A 30-year tragedy of exchanges

Huang Tien-lin 黃天麟

Thirty years ago, on Nov. 2, 1987, then-president Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) allowed Taiwanese to travel to China so that they could visit relatives. Pro-China media have used the anniversary as a chance to encourage cross-strait exchanges, and the Mainland Affairs Council organized a conference to discuss the past and future of such exchanges.

The question is whether the day is one of celebration and commemoration for Taiwan or whether it is the beginning of another tragedy, like Taiwan Restoration Day.

Protest highlights labor rights, land expropriation

Taipei Times

Labor rights campaigners demonstrate outside the Presidential Office Building on Taipei’s Ketagalan Boulevard yesterday, as part of the annual Autumn Struggle protest.
Photo: Liao Chen-huei, Taipei Times

The Autumn Struggle (秋鬥), an annual protest organized by labor rights advocates, yesterday rallied 61 groups as they marched down Taipei’s Ketagalan Boulevard and shouted their disappointment with the politics of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration.

Prolonging Chi Po-lin’s effect

Taipei Times Editorial

It is safe to say that few career civil servants, serving or former, have had as much of an impact on Taiwan as Ministry of Transportation and Communications employee-turned-documentary filmmaker Chi Po-lin (齊柏林), who died on June 10.

Since his untimely death in a helicopter crash, there has been an outpouring of grief and tributes to a man who almost single-handedly made it impossible for the average person — or the government — to ignore the devastation wrought by decades of unchecked development, feeble environmental regulations and even feebler enforcement, as well as societal disregard for the nation’s land, rivers, forests and coastline.

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