A lovely butterfly at the Detroit Zoo in Royal Oak, MI.
I've decided to discuss the numbers again because the topic is so interesting and to help think about how many really were there.Lin Ming-hua (林明華), director of the city police's Public Relations Department, said that they stopped giving out estimates of crowd sizes or marches two years ago when a march organized by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the People First Party was staged in front of the Presidential Office.Two key points from this. First, the police say it is 40K to a kilometer on a street. I'm not sure about the size of the street, but that's comparable to my count from the other day, so I am greatly cheered.
The demonstration was orchestrated to demand the "truth" about the election-eve assassination attempt, which many pan-blue supporters believe was staged by Chen despite any solid evidence to back up their theories.
Lin said that the city police originally refused to publicize the number of participants in Satur-day's rally on Ketagalan Boulevard, but they were told by the police chief at around 10:45pm to make it public.
Lin said that the official numbers were reliable because they were calculated using a formula.
Taking Friday's "siege" march as an example, Lin said that police estimated 40,000 people could fill 1km of the road that protesters walked down. As the march stretched more than 5.5km, the police estimated that about 220,000 people were on the street. On top of that number, city authorities figured that about 140,000 more were scattered along Ketagalan Boulevard and elsewhere, making the total number 360,000.
The pro-KMT side might deflate the numbers, but the pan-Greens are no better. The Liberty Times today dramatically reported that 300,000 people showed up. Check out the photo there. It is highly suspicious -- showing only the crowds from the south gate to the stage -- but on the ground, my photos show that the area to the south and east of the gate was precisely where the crowd thinned out -- and is the area not shown in the photos. Very suspicious. Note that it is still light when this photo is taken.
What would three hundred thousand or more look like? Here's a Taipei Times photo from the truly stupendous anti-secession law rally. See how jam-packed the area is? Google image search will give you more but they will all show that it was an unbelievable sea of humanity that day.
If you look carefully, the density starts to peter out once you get past the south gate. It's far denser on the other side. It is easy to see that 300K is an inflated overestimate.
Why is it so hard to get good estimates? Take this photo to the left. How wide is the crowd? How many to a rank? What constitutes a rank? Ok, let's say we're 40K to the kilometer in the street.....
...then what about these marchers -- four and five across on the sidewalks? If you only count the street, as you would certainly do in an photo from the sky, you'd have a 20% undercount, at least. I tried to include them, and that's how I came up with 50K with me. Depending on how you count, a rank had anywhere between 16 and 25 people, so conservatively 7 ranks was 100 souls, but in reality it was sometimes a lot less and sometimes a lot more. And then....
...what about these blackshirted fellows and the hundreds of others participating by yelling and waving flags from the sidelines, but not marching? Do we count them?
Here was another problem we encountered, though I don't really have a good picture of it. I started near the front of the march, but by the time we were halfway through, the march had elongated considerably and I was someone in the middle. People started to join from the front. You can see that it extends for a considerable distance in front of me.
As we walked down this large street, we look a little thinner in this photo, but actually, there are even more of us. Why?
As this important historical photo shows, large numbers of marchers "taking to the streets" are actually taking to the expansive sidewalks.
Another issue is resting marchers. You can see that in the park beyond many marchers are taking a break, as they did all along the way. Again, any count of "marchers" underestimates the crowd.
When you look at the photos by the old gate, you see the fantastic crowds, but you don't see these guys -- the ones sitting on the walls, standing on the sidewalks, and sitting in the park under the trees.Lately, to be honest, I haven’t been paying a whole lot of attention to Taiwanese politics. There’s just too much going on in the American political circus right now for me to tear myself away.
Yesterday, though, after work, Fanfan and I had a couple of hours to burn before a shindig at some friends’ house, so we stopped in Ximen (西門) to see if there were any movies out that were worth our valuable time.
Much to my surprise, upon emerging from the glossy, plastic mouth of the MRT, I realized that the Anti-Ma, “seperatist” protests were taking place right across the street. So, I hopped across the street and started snapping pictures and vids of the surprisingly large number of people taking part -- estimates I saw in the Liberty Times (自由時報) downstairs put the number at 300,000.
Of course, as many of you know, I’m quite interested in generational differences here in Taiwan (and elsewhere), so it was only fitting, I thought, to be standing at a crosswalk in Ximen, watching thousands of middle-aged Taiwanese men and women marching by, while hundreds of young Taiwanese kids breaking through the procession during every green light on their way to Ximen to shop, take pictures of themselves, and all the other things that people do at Ximen.
去台灣 親中國 馬上倒 means more or less, “Leave Taiwan, kiss China, and immediately turn everything upside down.” 馬上 (literally “on the horse'”) means “immediately” or “right away.” It’s a pun that’s become quite popular since 馬 [ma3] is President Ma’s family name.
The Chinese at the bottom of this “Ma You Suck” fan says “ROC, get out of Taiwan.”
美國人的爸爸就會親中賣台 “The American’s father is just going to kiss China and sell Taiwan.” I don’t particularly understand this one. Ma’s father was from Hong Kong, right?
馬賣台得金牌 “Ma sale of Taiwan merits a gold medal” (Or something like that)
Fanfan actually left and went to wander around Ximen for a little while because, she said she didn’t like the tone of a lot of the people’s chants and signs. This is probably a good example of one of them (on the left). It says: "Fuck the nine schools of thought government”
This is another example of those signs that Fanfan didn’t appreciate.
Suddenly David Reid and Darren Melrose, two other Taiwan bloggers, popped up next to me.
There were plenty of manifestations of economic woes on display.
I’ve no idea what that sign says.
I’ve seen these trucks before. A while back, I was walking out of Taipei Main Station, and these guys made a ruckus as they moved past.
I’ll be adding videos later.
For many who, for one reason or another, choose to make it their home, Taiwan is part opportunity and part love affair. From its weather, natural beauty, history, culture, food and wonderful people to the cross-strait reflection of what it chose not to be, Taiwan is a muse that over the years has transformed many a transitory visitor into a permanent friend fully committed to protecting it from the many ills — environmental, political — that threaten its existence. While the principal threat to Taiwan today is China’s designs upon it and Beijing’s political isolation of Taiwan on the international scene, not so long ago enemy No. 1 was at home, under the form of the Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) regimes, both supported financially, politically and militarily by the US in their repression of Taiwanese as part of Washington’s crusade against communism.