請各位看倌先看2001.03.06中國時報的報導
再比照新聞周刊原文
你會發現
新聞周刊中讚揚阿扁的部分全部不見啦
哈哈哈

美國新聞週刊：市民當家 新台北誕生
王良芬/紐約報導

最新一期新聞週刊以「新台北的誕生」為題，報導說由於台北市民的壓力，創造出一個乾淨、綠色的城市。現在的台北市交通順暢、都市綠化、居民生活水準提高，中產階級有更多的休閒，這一切都是小市民當家，不斷催生的結果。

新聞週刊說，台灣的首都在過去十年以來，一直不斷從事進行新生，台北市東區十多年前是垃圾場，現在則是購物中心、電影院、高價位的住宅大廈櫛比鱗次。一向為國際詬病的市區壅塞交通，除了尖峰時間外，也順暢許多。

文中說，過去做為機關重地的許多政府建物，在門禁森嚴多年後，現在已陸續開放參觀，或設置小型的博物館、藝術沙龍等。

該刊表示，這些明顯的進步實應歸功於全體市民的努力，不斷敦促政府的施政。天下雜誌負責人殷允芃告訴新聞週刊，台北市現在不再屬政府的官僚衙門了，而是屬於全體市民。

新聞週刊說，雖然新加坡、香港等鄰近幾個城市至今都還在求現代化，但近十年來從沒一個城市像台北一樣改變得這麼完全。

文中說，北市在十年前開車橫越市區得花上一個小時以上，沿路看到的是成千上萬輛的摩托車穿梭其間。住在郊區的居民，早上六點就得出門和紊亂的交通搏鬥。但是現在百分之四十的上班族利用捷運上下班，平均每個人每天只花二十四分鐘通勤。

該刊認為，居民年收入的提高是促使大家想增進生活品質的動力之一。和十年前相比，台北市現在的年平均所得成長了一倍，達到一萬三千美元。尤其是民進黨執政後，把台北這個首善之區更是當成了自己的家看待。

此外，政府在一九八七年解除戒嚴後，整個世代的台灣人及在海外留學生，開始為如何將台北提昇為國際都會而努力。十餘年下來，曾經為創造更多綠地、乾淨街道向政府施壓的中產階級，如今都有更多的休閒機會，從前為了政治訴求走上街頭與警察對峙的學生團體，現在把焦點轉到環境保護議題。

文中說，「垃圾不落地」的政策也改善了市民的居住環境品質，這項政策無形間也創造了一種文化，平常絕少聯絡、甚至不講話的鄰居，晚上手提著垃圾在街口為了等垃圾車來，大家也就聊起來了。

同時，拜自由之風，許多華文天地的藝術創作者也都將台北市視為必經之途或靈感的來源之處，中文的音樂ＣＤ在此地有亞洲華人城市最大的市場，台灣發行的連續劇在大陸大行其道，一月間造訪的諾貝爾文學獎得主高行健也不免說，台北市像個真正的家。

原文:

The Birth Of A New Taipei

Citizen pressure has created a clean, green city

By Mahlon Meyer
NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL

March 12 issue — There’s more than one way to appreciate a tree. On a recent Saturday morning, as he leads 25 parents and schoolchildren along a street next to Taipei’s Ta-An Forest Park, Jerome Su stops before a flowering sweet-gum tree.

HE CRUSHES AN aromatic leaf between his fingers, then holds it to the nose of a young boy so he can smell the musky scent. “People used to feel that trees should be cut down for economic development,” says the 50-year-old publisher, pointing to the base of the tree. Cracked and gnarled, the trunk struggles through the layers of concrete wrapped around its base. “Now we’ve got to learn how to preserve them. We’ll have to get up a petition.”

The fact that his class even has a tree to examine has much to do with people like Su, whose activism has helped remake the Taiwanese capital in the last decade. Once one of the most chaotic cities in Asia, Taipei is now ranked at the top of regional livability surveys. Less than 10 years ago, the whole eastern section of town was little more than a fetid garbage dump. Now luxury shopping malls, cinemas and high-rise apartment buildings fill the area. City lanes once choked with traffic flow smoothly at all but peak hours. Forbidding government buildings have been transformed into museums, literary salons and galleries. The changes are remarkable—all the more so because they have been driven primarily by Taipei’s residents. Says Diane Ying, publisher of Commonwealth, Taiwan’s leading business magazine, “The city now belongs to the citizens and not the bureaucrats.”
To the casual visitor, places like Singapore and Hong Kong remain more striking in their sleek modernity. But no other city in Asia has changed as radically as Taipei in the last decade. Ten years ago it often took more than an hour to cross the city by car. Streets were clogged by tens of thousands of motorcycles and scooters, their riders wearing surgical masks to block out the smog. Those living on the outskirts of the city often left home at 6 a.m. in order to reach work before 9. Now 40 percent of Taipei’s citizens use the subway, which opened last year, and the average person spends 24 minutes commuting each day. That has drastically reduced the number of vehicles on the roads—although motorcycles are still inescapable—and made the air breathable. In the past seven years, the level of suspended particles in the air has dropped almost 50 percent.
Rising incomes have contributed to the improvement in living conditions. (Per capita income has doubled over the past decade to more than $13,000.) But the city’s transformation has also been fueled by the same forces that have driven Taiwan’s democratic reforms. As native-born Taiwanese took control of the government, they began to treat the capital as home, rather than simply a pit stop on the way to retaking China. With the lifting of martial law in 1987, a whole generation of Taiwanese, educated abroad, began to return and try to raise Taipei to international standards. A burgeoning middle class had more time for leisure, which created pressure for more parks, modern cinemas and cleaner streets. Students who had spent their energy clashing with police over politics gradually turned to environmental issues. “During the 1980s the voice of an emerging civil society started to be heard,” says Hsia Chu-joe, an urban-planning professor.
More recently Taipei’s citizens have begun to push the government to upgrade the city’s infrastructure. In the 1990s a coalition of NGOs pressured authorities into creating Ta-An Forest Park, instead of a sports stadium, on the 26,000-hectare site of a slum where Army veterans once lived among rats and stray dogs. The sprawling, $9 billion subway system, begun in 1987 and plagued by delays and charges of corruption, would likely not have been completed had civic groups not insisted on the project. Current president Chen Shui-bian was elected the city’s mayor in 1994 largely because of his promises to respond to citizens’ demands to reduce traffic. He created bus lanes on most thoroughfares and sent squadrons of traffic police to every major intersection.
City dwellers have taken new responsibilities upon themselves, too. When Chen was first elected, piles of garbage lay on every major city street. Collection was haphazard, and rats, cockroaches and packs of stray dogs were attracted to the refuse. In coordination with citizens’ groups, Chen instituted a policy that “garbage shall not touch the ground.” Citizens began to wait patiently every night, trash in hand, for a new fleet of garbage trucks to stop at their corner. As they waited, neighbors who had never met began to chat, and the nightly garbage collection became the first form of urban community many citizens—some of whom had moved in from the countryside—had known.
Similarly, a new culture of civility has grown alongside the cleaner streets and more efficient transportation systems. City thoroughfares now boast broad sidewalks where people no longer jostle each other. Inside high-ceilinged subway stations, people who once fought to cram onto rickety, undependable city buses now line up calmly before the trains. A plethora of bookstores and coffee shops has fostered an atmosphere of sophistication.
At the same time, the freedoms driving its renaissance have made Taipei a cultural mecca for artists in the Chinese-speaking world. The city represents Asia’s most profitable market for Chinese-language music CDs, although piracy is drastically eating away at artists’ earnings. Taiwanese sitcoms and soap operas are among the most popular in mainland China. Taipei boasts thousands of publishing houses, compared with 500 in all of China. And Chinese writers, including the first to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Gao Xingjian, vie to have their books published in arguably the world’s freest Chinese city. “For someone who writes in Chinese,” Gao said on a visit to Taipei in January, the city is “truly home.”
Not everyone is pleased with Taipei’s shiny new exterior, of course. Young Internet entrepreneurs, some of them among the island’s IT elite, have blasted plans to raze the Kwanghua Arcade, an underground mall jam-packed with computers, peripherals and pirated software. (Neighbors are insisting that the stalls be relocated into a cleaner shopping center—in another part of town.) They fear that the arcade’s atmosphere of creative chaos will be lost in the gentrification. “Think of it this way,” says David Chen, the founder of IO Net, a popular electronic community. “The more concentrated things are, the more efficient they are, like the motherboard of a computer.”

Nor has Taipei eliminated the domestic problems inherent in any large city. Last year police recorded 56 murders, 184 rapes and more than 32,000 burglaries in the city. But Taipei’s rebirth at least presents an example for the mainland’s own overcrowded, smog-choked metropolises. As his class wanders down a flower-filled alley near Ta-An park, Su points out a profusion of purple wisteria tumbling over the glass shards atop a cement wall. “Like trees and flowers, people need the right environment,” he says. “As long as the government doesn’t interfere too much, they will find their own space.” And with luck, make it their own.

© 2001 Newsweek, Inc.

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