Elias KönigIn Hualien County, Indigenous Communities and Environmentalists are Resisting an Energy Transition Led by Billionaires
by Elias König and Immanuel Nikelski
語言:
English
Photo Credit: 山里部落青年聯盟
AS TAIWAN’S SUMMERS get increasingly hotter, water becomes life in the most literal sense. Under the scorching summer heat, the residents of Tausa/Tawsay (山里部落), a Sediq buluo (部落/village) in Southern Hualien like to cool off at the nearby riverbed of the Fengping River. It’s a stunning scene–as one of Taiwan’s last free-flowing rivers, the Fengping majestically emerges from the towering mountain range, meandering into the valley where it eventually joins the larger Xiuguluan and flows into the Pacific Ocean.
Riverbed near Tausa/Tawsay (山里部落)
Many here have stories to tell about growing up with the river. The riverbed is a central spot not just for cooling off, relaxing and playing in the water (玩水), but also a gathering spot for community meetings, barbecue and to teach traditional hunting techniques. It is here that the next generation can practice their skills and test their endurance in a safe environment and without exposure to the dangers of hunting on steep forest cliffs. Hunting is of particular importance as traditionally only men successful in hunting and women successful in weaving can access the realm of the ancestors after death. Hunting and culture are therefore linked, and access to the riverbed key to various community traditions. However, many residents fear that these may soon be memories of the past, as a large-scale construction project is poised to take away the river from the village.
Location of the planned hydropower plant on the East Coast of Taiwan
In one corner of the riverbed, the New Taipei-based company Shinfox Energy (森崴能源) has already set up structures that could soon host hundreds of construction workers. A few dozen are already here, as the roaring sound of trucks crunching through the riverbed reveals. Flush with new investments, the company hopes to revive a controversial 20-year-old plan to reroute the river and construct a massive new hydropower plant – all in the name of fueling Taiwan’s energy transition towards carbon neutrality. Elsewhere in the world, dam construction has been on the decline, as projects have been plagued by high construction costs, climate risks, and popular resistance, while solar and wind power have been recognized as cheaper and more convenient alternatives. Not in Taiwan, which recently unveiled plans to significantly increase hydropower generation to power its plans to become a leader in the field of Artificial Intelligence. Shinfox Energy can therefore be confident of its government backing, although the company’s intransparent communication, the aggressive behavior of its representatives and fears over environmental degradation have tainted its relationship with the local communities.
Shinfox Energy’s website sounds like that of an environmental NGO, but the company is backed by one of Taiwan’s richest business dynasties. (Screenshot from: SHINFOX ENERGY)
There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about Shinfox Energy’s intentions. The mastermind behind the company is Tai-Chiang “T.C.” Gou (郭台強), who hails from one of Taiwan’s most infamous business dynasties. T.C.’s older brother Terry Gou (郭台銘), is the founder Foxconn, the electronic manufacturer that produces Apple’s iPhones and is known for its abysmal working conditions. After a stint at his brother’s company, T.C. Gou himself later founded his own company Foxlink, which has since emerged as a key supplier of connectors and cable assemblies, including Apple’s Lightning and Thunderbolt cables.
A ruthless, well-connected businessman, T.C. Gou’s life is full of drama and political intrigue. Famously, he stands accused of conspiring together with former president Ma Ying-jeou in a plot to murder former KMT legislator Alex Tsai (蔡正元) in a power struggle over the party’s assets. After two bullets were fired at the latter’s office in Taipei, Tsai resigned as the chairman of the previously KMT-owned Central Motion Picture Corporation (CMPC), with T.C. Gou taking over his prestigious spot. In his capacity as chairman of the company, Gou quite ironically became one of the main investors into the film “Seediq Bale – Warriors of the Rainbow”, which narrates the history of the Sediq-led 1930 Wushe uprising during the Japanese colonial era and became an international success. Alleging his company had not received a fair share of the film’s profits, Gou even obtained a warrant of seizure against film director Wei Te-Sheng last year.
Map of the proposed hydropower plant (in white) and affected communities (in yellow). Source: Citizen Earth/地球公民
More recently, the same T.C. Gou seems to have taken an interest in the AI revolution. In May 2024, Foxlink announced a massive NT$2 billion (US$62 million) investment into a new AI data center in New Taipei City. The joint venture is intended to become “the largest and most powerful green AI computation service center in Asia.” Perhaps the AI industry’s insatiable hunger for electricity is linked to the chairman’s other new interest in Taiwan’s energy transition – not as an environmental cause, of course, but as a business opportunity. Via Foxlink-subsidiary Shinfox Energy, he has not only been involved in the hydropower sector, but also in various wind, solar, and LNG projects. One high-profile Shinfox-investment, a fossil gas-fired power plant in Tainan’s Anding district has recently also caught critical media attention, with the Taipei Times calling it a case of environmental injustice. The growing resistance to the project appears to bother the company so much that T.C. Gou made it a point to directly call on the new central government to help mitigate growing “local opposition” against the power plant just a few months ago. Along the Fengping River, the resistance is also growing.
Signs in the riverbed near Tavila (太平部落)
A few kilometers south of Tausa/Tawsay lies the Bunun village of Tavila (太平部落). When Tausa/Tawsay’s residents were displaced and moved to their current location by the Japanese following the Wushe anti-colonial uprising, the Bunun inhabitants of Tavila welcomed their new neighbors and helped them after a typhoon hit just one year after they were relocated by the Japanese colonial government. Now, Tavila has become a center of the resistance to the new dam project. The village is in an especially precarious position as it sits right at the end of the planned hydropower plant. A potential breach, landslides or other accidents would be most direly felt here. In various Facebook groups, residents of Tavila and Tausa/Tawsay discuss the project, share news, and organize various activities. In Tavila, too, the company has already claimed parts of the surrounding area and erected signs denying public access to traditionally Indigenous-owned land and water. One member of the community told us of a recent scuffle with a company worker after being told to not walk along the river, on his own land. Another time, members of the company started conducting works in the village, seemingly without permission, until the police intervened on behalf of the community. The take-over of Indigenous land, as well as the intransparent communication by the company, appear as a continuation of Taiwanese Indigenous history of different governments and companies grabbing Indigenous land to extract from it.
In collaboration with the environmental NGO Citizens of the Earth (地球公民), some in the community have brought forward a lawsuit to require Shinfox energy to reassess the project’s social and environmental impact. Under ROC law, Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA) are required for any construction project of a certain size or within protected areas. So far, Shinfox Energy has, however, refused to provide an up-to-date Environmental Impact Assessment, citing instead a fifteen-year old environmental impact assessment obtained by the company that had previously planned to build a similar power plant. As the coalition pointed out at a recent press conference in Taipei, this previous EIA contains numerous inconsistencies, including missing data and unsupported conclusions. According to Liang Sheng-yueh (梁聖岳), an expert at the Citizens of the Earth Foundation, the courts did not consider at all the significant flow variations of the Fengping river. The need for a new EIA should be obvious also given the scale of environmental changes seen in the past two decades, including a rapidly escalating climate crisis, but also due to a series of earthquakes, including the recent 403 Hualien earthquake, which have left visible impacts in the landscape.
Protest against the hydropower plant in Taipei, 2022. Photo credit: 山里部落青年聯盟
Shinfox Energy therefore is right to fear that it may not pass a renewed Environmental Impact Assessment. Indeed, the activist motion for renewed EIA was rejected by the High Court in Taipei, thanks to an old glaring loophole in ROC legislation. It is this loophole that activists are now targeting with a new round of appeals.
Press conference concerning the ongoing lawsuit at the Citizens of the Earth Foundation (地球公民基金會) office in Taipei, May 2024
While the court proceedings are still ongoing, Shinfox is already creating new realities on the ground: Around the valley, signs in Southeast Asian languages like Thai, Tagalog, and Indonesian have appeared, signaling the pending influx of a labor force mostly made up of migrant workers from abroad. Just as during the era of Japanese colonial rule, members of the Hakka minority were moved to the East to provide cheap labor in forests and plantations, nowadays migrant workers from Southeast Asia have become the preferred choice for Taiwanese capital. A strict legal regime makes it possible for such workers to be paid below minimum wage and impossible or inconvenient to change work after arriving in Taiwan. While some Indigenous workers are also employed by Shinfox, the company is unlikely to provide many stable, well paying jobs to the community. Moreover, a recent incident where a person allegedly working for the company drowned near the construction site in the Fengping riverbed has raised serious concerns about work safety, especially considering the otherwise dismal labor rights record of Foxlink and other companies run by the Gou family.
If the story of a shady tycoon with dubious political connections planning to transform a whole string of Indigenous communities and attract hundreds of migrant workers to build a giant hydropower plant in the middle of one of Taiwan’s last free-flowing rivers – all with the aim of powering, among other things, his own AI data hub – sounds absurd, it does so because it is absurd. It only appears logical within the context of an energy transition that is organized around the principles of profit and private ownership rather than sustainability and justice. While for the majority of the world, the transition away from fossil fuels is already a matter of life and death, for companies like Shinfox it constitutes first and foremost a business opportunity: Despite protests across multiple locations, the company proudly boasts a net income of more than 680 million NTD over past year, as well as a 29% increase in share price. This is in stark contrast to the principle of a “just transition”, which has been enshrined in Taiwan’s Climate Change Response Act (氣候變遷因應法). It begs the question: Can a truly democratic and just energy transition really be achieved by outsourcing the fate of our planet to a class of billionaires that cares mostly for itself and its profits?
The authors would like to thank all those who shared their knowledge and perspectives on the ongoing case, in particular Lawsi Umin, Lucas Sunavan, Liang Sheng-yueh, Yakaw Uylang, as well as the many other human and non-human comrades we were fortunate to meet in this process. The research contributing to this article was carried out on occupied land and we stand in solidarity with those who continue to resist this occupation every day. We encourage readers to join the struggle!
Elias König is a PhD candidate at Twente University in the Netherlands and recently based in Taipei. He writes about philosophy, colonialism, and climate justice.
Immanuel Nikelski is a Master’s student at National Dong Hwa University in Hualien, researching social movements, climate justice and transportation (not least because of his love for the UBike system).