Daily Bloom is the shortform blog of New Bloom, covering breaking news events as they occur in real-time. 

Demonstrators gathering at Songshan Airport. Current calls by demonstrators at the Legislative Yuan is that individuals should go to Songshan Airport, since there are already a number of people on-site at the Legislative Yuan and this would not have any effect on the Xi-Ma summit. Although there only appear to be ten to twenty demonstrators so far, Chen Wei-Ting of Sunflower Movement fame is among those demonstrators.

It is also known that there are demonstrators, in fact, en route to Singapore by plane drawn from post-Sunflower activist groups Democracy Tautin, Dreamdom, and Restoration of Taiwan Social Justice. These three groups also seem to be the main organizers of the large-scale rally planned for this afternoon, though as the situation fluid, it remains to be seen whether demonstrators will in fact divert to Songshan Airport.

Ma’s plane is slated to leave at 5:45 AM in order to make his meeting with Xi in Singapore this afternoon at 3 PM. As it is roughly 2:30 AM in Taipei, the current plan may be for protestors to demonstrate Ma’s leaving, or even  to carry out direct action then, and for larger numbers of protestors to then gather for Ma’s return to Taipei tonight  just after midnight tonight. Or that demonstration would be carried out at Songshan Airport to be concurrent with Ma’s meeting with Xi, possibly in the hopes of building numbers for Ma’s return.

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Author: Brian Hioe
Photo Credit: 王奕凱
Biography: Brian Hioe (丘琦欣) is an M.A. student at Columbia University, a freelance writer on politics and social activism, and an occasional translator. He is a resident of Taipei, Taiwan.

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