Taiwan bulldozes illegal communist shrine at Buddhist temple
Businessman and his 20 followers shout party slogans at final ceremony before the demolition begins on magistrates’ orders
A Buddhist temple in Taiwan that had been turned into a base to promote Chinese communism and cross-strait unification is being demolished by local authorities.
Wei Ming-jen, a Taiwanese businessman, had converted the 96-year-old Biyun Temple into a much larger building and replaced Buddhist paintings and paraphernalia with Communist Party symbols, propaganda posters and portraits of party leaders such as Xi Jinping, Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong.
But bulldozers were sent in to the site in Ershui township in central Taiwan’s Changhua county on Wednesday after a magistrate ruled it was an illegal construction and must be used for its original purpose.
Wei, who ran a construction company before he started promoting communism in 2012, was awarded ownership of the temple six years ago in a legal dispute with the previous owners, a group of nuns who had hired him to renovate it. He renamed it “Socialism, Nationalism and Patriotism Education Base”, and surrounded it with mainland flags.
The base proved controversial because of deep-rooted suspicion in Taiwan about the Chinese Communist Party since 1949, when the defeated Kuomintang, or Nationalists, fled to the island from the mainland. The suspicion remains, with Beijing insisting Taiwan is a wayward province to be taken back by force if necessary.