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Updated Sunday, December 26, 2010 11:56 pm TWN, The China Post news staff

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Rural folk wary of new municipalities

Residents of rural areas in Taiwan's newly formed special municipalities are worried that their livelihoods will only get worse despite the political upgrade, a newspaper reported yesterday.

The government has been boasting the political upgrade's benefits to local development, but rural residents are instead bracing for losses in business opportunities, public services, and even their identity, the United Evening News said.

“In the future, if the street lamp in front of my house fails, will the city councilor help (fix it)?” the paper cited a rural resident as asking.

Before the upgrade the man would have sought help from the village chief or a member of the local representative body.

But now such local representative bodies are gone, and vast rural areas are usually represented by only one seat in the municipal council.

Councilors from these vast rural areas are unlikely to have much time to handle minor cases, the paper cited the man as saying.

The upgrade — which took effect yesterday — saw the mergers of neighboring cities and counties, such as those in Kaohsiung, Tainan and Taichung.

In the case of Xinbei, the geographical boundaries of the original Taipei County remain intact, but there are a lot of administrative changes within the city.

In Taichung, store owners near the original city and county government office buildings are now seeing a drastic drop in traffic and business.

They were at the center, serving government employees and people coming to the offices. But the newly formed municipal government has moved its headquarters elsewhere.

Some shops in the two original neighborhoods are already shutting down, the paper said.

In Tainan, some residents are complaining about the loss of their identity.

The original Hsiaying Township, with only a population of about 20,000, is not big enough to form a district of its own in the new municipality.

It will be combined with its neighboring Matou, Kuantien and Liuchia townships to form a new district called Tsengwen, the paper said.

A high school teacher from Tainan said it hurts to see their hometowns' names disappear from the map, the paper said.

The paper said the upgrade in Tainan is likely to boost the development in the southern areas of the municipality, widening the gap with the rural areas in the north.

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Comments

December 27, 2010 CURTISAKBAR@

Shops closing after less than a week? Those shops would have closed regardless of the change. It seems to me that people will blame the government for anything.
Oh no, the name of our town is going to change, we've lost everything now; our identity, jobs, culture and history. Grow up, names change all the time and especially in Chinese culture where people can have various names depending on their circumstances. Didn't Sun Yat San have 3 or 4 names?