Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

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.

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.