Camp-in Protest against Beach Hotel in Taidong

[Mucha Man]

The Taidong Council has decided to 'over-rule' the supreme court and declare their decision regarding the environmental impact statement 'invalid'.

Even in the sometimes crazy world of Taiwan, how does a local council get to over-ride a supreme court judgement and make it stick?

Because no one will enforce the high court ruling in a local setting, or at best it will be fines that are laughably low. Better to run a profitable illegal business than a non-profitable non-business.

Remember the Miyako case? No jail time for beating a man near senseless because they showed remorse and gave him some money.

[dulan drift]

The Taidong Council has decided to 'over-rule' the supreme court and declare their decision regarding the environmental impact statement 'invalid'.

Even in the sometimes crazy world of Taiwan, how does a local council get to over-ride a supreme court judgement and make it stick?

Because no one will enforce the high court ruling in a local setting, or at best it will be fines that are laughably low. Better to run a profitable illegal business than a non-profitable non-business.

Remember the Miyako case? No jail time for beating a man near senseless because they showed remorse and gave him some money.

Yeah that's the thing about Taiwan. The high court judge in kaohsiung bangs his gavel down and rules against the hotel, but he doesn't then get down off his chair, jump in his car and drive to Taidong and tell the owners of the Miramar hotel group to stop building it and start tearing it down and stuff your expenses because you were knowingly illegal from day one. That's the job of the Taidong council, who, if necessary, instruct the police force to carry out the ruling. Trouble is, they were in on the racket in the first place.

And that's the other thing. Surely some of these things that have come out - phoney development plans in order to circumvent the Environmental Impact Assessment - stacking the EIA committee when they were forced to conduct an EIA - just to name a couple - shouldn't there be some jail time involved for the people responsible? Apart from ex-Presidents and other vendetta driven cases, do white collar criminals ever end up going to jail in Taiwan? or do they just get fined a tiny fraction of their haul?

Actually, it would be nice to get a bit of international attention on this case. Get the business world watching to see if there's a 'rule of law' playing field here in Taiwan or is corruption still institutionalized? And if you come here to do business then you better know how to play the game.

As for the Miyako case - if we could get a result like that then that would be a big improvement - if they'd piss off back to wherever they came from and pay restitution costs - you'd nearly let them off the jail time. However, what we've got is where the government gives the miyako thug one of the best three beaches in Taiwan and ignores every law in the book to allow him to ruin it and continue to make a dynastic financial killing out of it.

[dulan drift]

Ok, there's an English FB page up pertaining specifically to the upcoming camp-in and concert. http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100003960420255&sk=wall.

There are a lot of foreigners on these boards that have got a solid stake in Taiwan, some with kids and the whole catastophe, most of which recognize the east coast as the positive soul of Taiwan. Even if you don't live here, it's nice to have that as somewhere you can go to on the island that's still pure Formosa. And sure, at some point in your life you have got to be where the money is, the big cities, but for those that harbour that beautiful 'house by the sea' one day, it's all here, and you've got a strong vested interest in seeing the east coast remain un-fucked up.

Right now it's at tipping point. I don't think that's over-stating it. This has got 'landmark case' written all over it and it might be the last chance to establish the east coast as a preserved, national, natural treasure.

The Taidong Council has 'over-ruled' the High Court, so the only tool left is the court of public opinion. That's where we can come in.

From the last meeting, a couple of issues arose - one in particular is that the Miramar Resort is planning to charge entrance to access the beach during the time that the camp-in and concert will be held. We definitely don't want people coming to the protest to be contributing to the ill-gotten gains of the Miramar Resort so we'll be working out a way around it and solution(s) will be posted, don't worry about that.

[Abacus]

Keep working brother. Can't make Sat, but if the July 28 party goes ahead, we'll come down for that.

July 28th could work for me also.

[dulan drift]

Decided to google 'Miramar Protest' to see if we were gaining any cyber traction, but was pissed off to find that the trayvon martin case happened in a place called Miramar - can you believe that? Of course there are 'Miramar Protests' galore, but they're all happening on the other side of the earth and take up about the first 1000 pages of google.

However, Miramar Resort Protest does come up and Forumosa is number two. For Miramar Hotel Protest, it's no.1. So that's good. It should be coming onto their radar at least. I'm sure their PR dept knows that trampling over the environment, indigenous rights, the views of the general public (in Taiwan at least - in China they probably think it's brilliant as it will mainly be them using it), and high court rulings is not considered a great look these days. The more that gets out there in the national conversation, the greater likelihood that someone's gonna mention at a meeting that 'Maybe we should start looking at how to cut our losses here and get the hell out of this PR nightmare'.

Meanwhile, preparations for the mass protest are going ahead full steam. I think one of the good things about it is that a decision was made that it won't be all bands. There'll be plenty of them, and good ones, but it will be a performing arts festival rather than a straight music festival.

Speaking of which, a friend was going to hook me up with some fire twirling(?) crew from Taipei. Unfortunately that guy had to leave the country for a funeral and obviously I don't want to bother him. Does anyone else know of these people? That would go down well at a beach concert I would imagine.

Another point from the last meeting was to make it less an 'Anti' thing, and more a peaceful, positive thing. Which it actually is (I'm not especially, but the movement is). Replace the hotel with a peaceful, beautiful, native plant park (like it was before, pretty much). Looking out to sea from a shady tree on an ancient beach - I don't know if you can get more peaceful than that.

[Mucha Man]

Good luck with this, and keep posting. I'll be reading about it from China but you have my support.

[Abacus]

I kind of know a foreigner fire crew in Kaohsiung that might be interested.

Here are my photos from April - http://theworldisnotthatbig.com/2012/04 ... er-garden/

[dulan drift]

I kind of know a foreigner fire crew in Kaohsiung that might be interested.

Here are my photos from April - http://theworldisnotthatbig.com/2012/04 ... er-garden/

Looks great! Could you sound them out, see if they're interested?

[dulan drift]

Below is a short clip from the building of the shelter (Talu'an) on the beach in readiness for the concert on July 28. More than 50 people turned up for the build and the sense of communal spirit was high. Made from driftwood, bamboo, and coconut tree fronds, it also houses a documentary exhibition of the history of the protest. As it's the shadiest place on the beach, it's good to see the general public coming to use it to get out of the sun which then makes them a captive audience for our propaganda!

Another foreigner has started turning up to the meetings and last time we sat together thinking that we could pool our Chinese knowledge in the hope of getting a better understanding of proceedings. That was a flawed idea because we discovered we both had roughly the same inadequacies. At one point they seemed to be talking about dzong dzr (dumplings) and wen chuan (hotsprings) in relation to a proposed protest action. What? Why are we going to be eating dumplings while sitting in a hotspring as a protest action - in summer? In winter, maybe, but not in the middle of summer, surely.

What they were actually talking about was jhong jr (middle finger) and wen shuen (poster). Apparently jhong jr also means 'terminate' and so someone suggested that that be incorporated as a hand gesture that could readily be associated with the movement. In fact there had already been a protest by some uni students in Taipei that had used it and supposedly some famous dissident artist in China had used it as well. As foreigners, we vehemently opposed the idea arguing that it was way too offensive and aggressive and would only serve to alienate a large chunk of middle class mums and dads that the movement needs on-side in order to truly gain mass support. Let it run as underground thing for uni students and the like, ok, but definitely not on an official level. Our message is peace and love for the environment - not 'up yours' to anyone who is undecided or disagrees with us.

Thankfully, it was decided to not decide right there and consider it some more.

.

[dulan drift]

However, as Pidek says, it was noticed by a lot of other people, especially the people who were living in the village next door to it, and a protest movement began with the aim of stopping it in the building stage. It was challenged on the grounds that it hadn’t done an obligatory environmental impact assessment for a building of that size. The case went to the high court which said, ‘no, you clearly haven’t done an environmental impact statement, building needs to stop, and you need to get one done’. The environmental impact statement was done and, not surprisingly, considering it’s a massive, polluting monstrosity right on a beautiful, public beach, they failed.

Was just re-reading the original post and noticed an error. I do do my best to get the facts straight, but sometimes a mixture of my inadequate Chinese, complicated legal matters, and occasionally a degree of over-exhuberance from some of the sources can lead to mistakes.

What actually happened was that once the court ruled that they needed to undergo an EIA, the Miramar Resort and Taidong Council cobbled together a panel of their own choosing to conduct the assessment, which, not surprisingly, they passed.

However, it was the validity of this panel that was challenged by the anti-Miramar Resort coalition in the Supreme Court, which, in turn, ruled in the landmark decision of Jan 2012, that it had been corruptly convened on the grounds that the committee was stacked with political cronies that were always going to support the hotel. Further, the ruling stipulated that in order to apply for a new EIA, they would need to first tear down the hotel and restore the land to its original condition. The Taidong Council has since declared the Supreme Court's ruling 'invalid' and are attempting to rush through another sham EIA. And that's where we stand today.