Earlier this week I came across ‘Occupy Taipei’ in the local news. As a solidarity protest alongside occupying Wall Street in the US, Occupy Taipei sought to peacefully protest against the rich/poor divide in Taiwan.

Of course this is a generalisation, as there were a number of other reasons protestors attended too. Things such as unpaid overtime, long working hours, 99% of people not having enough to get by, tax rates, living standards, the Taiwanese pension being to low etc.

Basically if you had a gripe with society that was in some way related to finance, Occupy Taiwan was a chance to get your cause heard.

Take these guys for example, they were obviously fed up of being in the 1% of Taiwan who apparently don’t get any sex…

Waking up at 8′ish this morning, I had a quick shower before jumping on the Long Haul Trucker and rode over to Taipei 101 see what went down.

Getting there, the crowds were initially thin, probably less than a 100 (at times it felt like there were more media there than protestors).

Things did start to pickup as time went on, and the crowd did eventually grow to a decent enough size;

Even businessmen were stopping to get in on the action;

For some reason though, and I’ve got no idea why, the protestors decided to sparsely spread out around the outside of the Taipei 101 plaza area.

You had these guys on the front steps, who had decided to call themselves ‘Angry Birds’

These guys were singing some songs;

Somebody brought a tent;

And these guys were giving megaphone speeches;

Later on these guys came and sat down right outside the plaza entrance leading into Taipei 101.



I thought security wouldn’t have let them but they didn’t seem to mind (too much).

This guy (who I think is the head of security) though did seem to get a bit irate and started to order people around.



Speaking of security, they (along with the police) were out in full force;

The media were also out in abundance, although this reporter was having trouble convincing random members of the public to do a quick interview;

At around 12:30 or so, the protests outside moved to march around Taipei 101.

I think the idea was to form a link around the building, but there wasn’t nearly enough people at the protest to do it.

These two marchers were the only two ‘anonymous’ mask wearing protestors I saw the entire day;

Here’s some video footage of the march around Taipei 101 that I shot. Note the Chinese propaganda car gatecrashing the protest towards the end of the second video!




This idiot was driving around blasting pro-Chinese propaganda out of loudspeakers. He was being a bit of a nuisance, stopping where he could attempting to drown everyone out with his ‘music’.

I wonder if the irony was lost on him that if we were doing an Occupy China protest, everyone attending would no doubt have been shot dead by now.

What a wonderful reason to accept a Chinese invasion!

At one point the Angry Birds protestors took it upon themselves to block the Taipei 101 carpark;

Once back at the plaza, protestors tried to enter Taipei 101 itself.

After a bit of confusion with a gazillion news cameras blocking the way, police and security began to let some but not all people in. I think the deciding factor may have been if people appeared to be in organised groups or not. For example once inside, I didn’t see any Angry Birds protestors…

Seeing a protest in Taipei 101 was quite interesting. The protestors literally just interrupted a trade day and walked around singing songs and giving speeches.


As you can see, it got pretty chaotic.



Some shops (Chanel and Dior) shat themselves and scrambled to lower their security doors.

Meanwhile other stores stayed open, but placed staff at the entrance like security guards.

Other staff just gave up and decided to play with their phones.

Once the walking was done, the procession eventually made its way to a foyer area near Xinyi Road and protestors began to literally occupy Taipei 101 by sitting themselves down in this area.

Once seated the protestors sang some more songs;



This old guy didn’t seem too impressed. I’m not exactly sure what he was saying, but it looked like he was scolding this reporter for bothering to cover the protest;

This guy brought his guitar and did a song;



I also spotted this 921 Earthquake jacket which I thought was interesting…

Meanwhile some random white guy (photo right) thought it’d be a good idea to say something in English. He brought his friend up to the mic and started… but then I’m not sure what happened.

He seemed to have to finish what he was saying mid-speech and then a bunch of old guys (Taipei 101 managers I think) decided to speak.

Maybe the guy’s friend had trouble translating…



I was running low on battery and space on my N8 at this point so I decided to call it a day. From what I can gather some more speeches were given before the protest ended and everyone went on their way.

Although not something I fully understood (everything was in Chinese) it was definitely interesting to see a protest put on inside Taipei 101. Pretty much as far as Taiwan goes, Taipei 101 is the absolute symbol of capitalism and wealth… and to have it occupied by randoms protesting is something I doubt I’ll ever see again.

Occupy Taipei might have had smallish numbers compared to other protests worldwide today but it was always going to be a hard sell with Taiwan’s relatively low unemployment rate. Still, I enjoyed the day and a part of Taiwanese culture (although they were protesting in solidarity with American Wall Street protestors, the protest definitely had a Taiwanese spin on it) I wouldn’t normally get to see.

Whether anything actually comes from the protest other than filler for the daily news is another thing entirely. Personally, I wouldn’t be holding my breath.



Related posts that might interest you:
  1. China’s hypocrisy over ‘Occupy Wall Street’ censorship
  2. The Chinese Propaganda Car of Xinyi District, Taipei