When farmers took to the streets of Taipei to protest earlier this month, the response from the public was tremendous. However, it was only one year ago that those same farmers staged an overnight protest on Ketagalan Boulevard that seems to have been largely forgotten. A year has passed, but the government continues to act as though nothing is wrong even though land expropriation cases have been just as appalling this year as they were last year.
Why is this happening?
One reason is that the government mistakenly believes land expropriation to be an important way to develop land and improve its fiscal position.
Government finances are in serious jeopardy, but instead of imposing higher taxes on the wealthy to boost revenue, the rich are given tax breaks, tax exemptions and other economic privileges. So where else is the funding for much needed infrastructure projects to be found? The answer is to use land expropriation to prop up land development.
Land-related taxes such as the land value tax and land value increment tax are the main sources of tax income for local governments. In this context, it is hardly surprising that how to collect more tax revenue becomes the focus of much policy debate.
In addition, those in power can utilize land development projects to co-opt local politicians, thereby killing two birds with one stone.
The reason local governments are using every means possible to turn farmland into urban land is that farmland is not taxable and as such brings in no revenue. Article 53 of the Executive Yuan’s Equalization of Land Rights Act (平均地權條例) states that all expansion or renewal of urban planning, or reassignment of farmland or protected zones as land for construction, must be achieved through zone expropriation. This has caused the expropriation of farmland to double.
Zone expropriation allows the government to expropriate large areas of land and subsequently make huge profits by auctioning it off or selling it by tender.
Because government has the final say when it comes to urban planning, many urban planning districts have been continually expanded and more designated areas are being established near industrial and science parks. As a result, urban planning has gotten out of hand as local governments exaggerate population numbers and use falsified data as a pretext to turn farmland into urban land.
At present there is a difference of more than 7 million between fabricated population numbers and the actual population. Although there is still much unused land in industrial and science parks, meeting the needs of these exaggerated figures creates the false impression that construction on this land is necessary.
The government has deliberately established such a distorted mechanism to expropriate land because it can then carry out its own land development agenda and significantly increase revenue intake.
It is most regrettable that the strict regulations and guidelines that should govern land expropriation have been willfully pushed aside, and that the basic property rights and human rights guaranteed by the Constitution have been neglected. As a result, the members of one of society’s most disadvantaged groups — farmers — are being forced to bear the burden of funding government infrastructure construction.
Social justice is turned on its head in a world where the poor are robbed to feed the rich.
Hsu Shih-jung is chairman of National Chengchi University’s Department of Land Economics.
TRANSLATED BY KYLE JEFFCOAT
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017