2014 太陽花學運：Taiwan Stands Behind Use of Force Against Protesters○New York Times（2014.03.24）

【Comment】

The innermost fear against the Communist China among the Taiwanese has been agitated by the fact that President Ma Ying-jeou’s Service Trade agreement with China was done through secret negotiations and the way Ma, as the chairperson of ruling Kuomintang, demands it to be passed at all cost in the Legislative Yuan.    revised on 20140327

服貿，以及馬政府秘密談判、強行快速通過的方式，激起人民心底對中國的根本性恐懼。

Taiwan Stands Behind Use of Force Against Protesters○New York Times（2014.03.24）http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/25/world/asia/taiwan-defends-use-of-force-against-protesters.html?_r=1

TAIPEI, Taiwan — Taiwan’s prime minister said on Monday that the government had been justified in using force to remove demonstrators from the cabinet building earlier in the day, as students continued to occupy the nearby legislature in a protest against a trade bill with China.

“What happened yesterday wasn’t police suppressing a street march,” Prime Minister Jiang Yi-huah said.  “It was protesters breaking into the Executive Yuan, trying to occupy this building and paralyze our administrative workings,” he added, referring to the cabinet building.

At least 174 people, including 119 police officers, were wounded as the police wielded wooden clubs and later used water trucks to block the growing protest.

In a statement posted online, the protesters who have occupied the legislature, or Legislative Yuan, since last week said that they “strongly condemn the violence against the unarmed, weaponless students.”

Mr. Jiang said that 61 people were arrested when the police cleared the building Monday morning, and that 35 of them faced possible prosecution.

The government faces broadening concerns, as some student groups have now called for a work and school strike across this self-governed island of 23 million to allow more to attend the demonstrations in Taipei, the capital.

In an hour-long news conference on Monday at the Executive Yuan, just hours after it had been cleared of demonstrators, Mr. Jiang urged students not to push for a strike.

“The nature of this matter is that all levels of society have different views as to the signing of the service trade agreement, but that is no reason to use as a pretext for a national work and school strike,” he said.

The China trade bill, which would allow cross-strait investment on dozens of service trades ranging from banking to funeral parlors, has touched deep roots of concern, including Taiwan’s own history of authoritarian rule and its uneasy relationship with China, an emerging giant that considers the island part of its own territory that must eventually be reunited.

While many of the student demonstrators opposed the deal outright, others said they supported lowering trade barriers on some industries.  Their most fundamental objection, they said, was to the way the deal was moved through Taiwan’s legislature.  Members of Kuomintang, the governing party, forced the motion through to the legislative floor without a promised item-by-item review.

The opposition Democratic Progressive Party cried foul.  Many demonstrators have described the moves by the Kuomintang as “authoritarian,” a pointed reference to the party’s all-powerful role in Taiwan before democratization in the 1980s and ’90s.

“Spread propaganda and ignore the opinion of the public, this is neither democracy nor rule of law,” a student leader, Lin Fei-fan, chanted from the rostrum of the occupied legislature on Sunday.