Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

Suicide is usually a private, impulsive response to extreme personal stress or anxiety, and is carried out, in most cases, in the confines of a person’s home or office, far from the glare of photographers and news reporters.

However, for more than 100 Tibetans who have committed suicide in public by dousing themselves with gasoline and setting themselves on fire — “self-immolation” is the Western media’s polite word for this — such actions were intentionally public and carry an important message.

From the general mood on Saturday, it was hard to imagine that the 100,000 people who protested in downtown Taipei were mobilizing against a policy that, as they interpret it, is a matter of life and death for themselves and — judging by the large number of babies and children — their descendants.

What with the laughter, gaudy costumes, soap bubbles, incessant picture-taking and lively songs, one would think one had chanced upon a festival of some sort, not a rally against an ill-understood form of energy that, in the wake of the nuclear incident at the Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant in Japan in March 2011, fuels people’s fears of the terrible consequences should a catastrophe occur at one of the nation’s three operational plants.