New Bloom (Taipei) — Police clashed with protesters in Tainan on August 20 and 21 as authorities forcibly evicted the last household resisting plans to construct the Tainan Urban District Railway Underground Project.

A total of 340 households were displaced for the railway development project, among which five steadfastly resisted.

The  confrontation had gone on for years. Earlier resistance led to construction being suspended in May 2019, while the Oppose the Tainan Railway Eastern Expansion Self-Help Organization was formed to coordinate protest efforts.

Chen Zhi-xiao, the chair of the self-help organization, ran to become a legislator in 2020 on a platform of halting the planned evictions, but lost by over 4,000 votes.

The last resisting household was the Huang family, which owns two homes in the neighborhood, and whose 99-year-old matriarch is an occupant of one of the houses. The Huang family home was scheduled for demolition in July 2020, but after eight hours of protests, police agreed to delay the demolition for two months. A livestream of protests against the demolition attempt by the Taiwan Land Justice Action Union was widely watched online that month, garnering over 51,000 views and close to a thousand comments.

Subsequently, on the morning of October 13, police and workers from the Ministry of Transportation and Communication knocked down much of the Huang family home, along with a home belonging to a family surnamed Chen. Before this action took place, sleep-ins and around-the-clock watches were organized by student activists working with the Huang family in order to ensure that an overnight demolition did not take place.

Despite the partial demolition of their home, the Huang family vowed that they would continue living in the building so long as the structure’s staircase remained intact.

Following the most recent round of demolition on August 20, more than 300 police were mobilized and were successful in demolishing the building’s staircase, dragging out sixty student activists who sought to prevent it. Subsequently, police installed a fence and posted security guards.

Student activists returned on August 21, but were again dragged out of the building and placed under restraint. Some of the students refused to reveal their identities when questioned, with police stating that protest leaders Huang Chun-xiang, a member of the Huang household, and Lee Rong-yu would face charges. After being arrested, Huang returned again and was again removed.

Presiding over this series of events was Fang Yang-ning, currently the head of the Tainan Police Department.

During the Sunflower Movement in 2014, Fang was the head of the Zhongzheng First Police Precinct, which is the police precinct that the Legislative Yuan, Executive Yuan, and other key central government buildings are located within. During the course of the movement, Fang was accused at that time of ordering heavy-handed measures against student activists.

Unfortunately, the forcible eviction of residents for infrastructure development or commercial development is common in Taiwan. Oftentimes, many of those evicted are elderly people who have spent decades living in the same place, and who are poor and have nowhere to go. Yet the authorities have justified such evictions as necessary for the sake of urban planning.

When elderly people resist and are forcibly removed from their homes, often they are made to shoulder the cost of the demolition of their own homes, with authorities even deciding that they are no longer entitled to compensation.

Protests against forced evictions led by progressive youth activists were common in the years before and immediately after the 2014 Sunflower Movement. But while forced evictions have continued to take place since the Tsai Ing-wen administration came to power in May 2016, such protests have not enjoyed widespread popular support, with even some of the activists who previously spoke up against them now quiet.

This article was originally published in New Bloom.

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