Tsay Ting-kuei

Tsay Ting-kuei (; born 24 March 1949) is a Taiwanese civil engineer and political activist. He is a professor of engineering at National Taiwan University, where he has conducted research in areas including coastal engineering and computational hydraulics. In politics, he served in various positions in the Chen Shui-bian administration in the mid-2000s, and rose to greater prominence for his protests in support of the Taiwan independence movement.

Early life and education Tsay was born in Ziguan District, Kaohsiung, on March 24, 1949. He then moved to the United States and earned his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1982. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on numerical solutions to certain hydraulics problems. He served in that position until 2004, after which he became vice-chairman of the Environmental Protection Administration until 2005, and took up the position of acting chairman in between the terms of Chang Juu-en and Chang Kuo-long. Since the passage of the 2003 Referendum Law, the government would only review referendum proposals supported by the signatures of at least 0.5% of the voter turnout in the most recent presidential election; whether or not to hold the referendum remained the decision of a government-appointed board. Tsay's goal was to make it easier for a Taiwan independence referendum to be proposed and conducted. By January 2010, he had been assessed fines of more than NT$800,000 relating to his occupation of public space during the sit-in protest. Lacking funds to pay the fines, Tsay and his supporters began soliciting donations outside the Presidential Office in Taipei, due to which he was arrested and had further fines assessed against him, in that case for alleged violations of the Assembly and Parade Act. The donations were largely in the form of coins; Tsay and his fellow protestors spent nine hours in the police station counting the reported three hundred and sixty thousand coins. In 2012, Tsay and the TRA also initiated a walking protest in support of clemency for former president Chen Shui-bian, who had been imprisoned after a conviction for corruption charges.

In late February 2014, about a week before the 67th anniversary of the February 28 Incident, Tsay led a group of fellow Taiwan Referendum Alliance members in removing a statue of Sun Yat-sen from Tang De-jhang Memorial Park in Tainan, a park named for a local lawyer executed during the military crackdown which followed the February 28 Incident. Kuomintang politicians including Fan Chiang Tai-chi condemned the TRA's actions. During the March and April 2014 Sunflower Student Movement, Tsay and the TRA also led sympathy protests outside of the Legislative Yuan. After the removal of protestors from the square in front of the Legislative Yuan, Tsay led further protests outside the Zhongzheng First Police Precinct station.

Selected works