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TAIPEI: Thousands of protesters on Sunday night staged a sit-in protest against President Ma Ying-jeou's China-friendly policies, which they say have compromised the island's sovereignty.
The sit-in protest, being staged outside the presidential office in Taipei, began at 10:00 pm (1400 GMT) and was scheduled to last for 24 hours, the organisers said.
"Taiwan's sovereignty has been vanishing over the past year" since Ma came to power in May 2008, said chairwoman Tsai Ing-wen of the leading pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in an address to the crowd.
She accused Ma of "using Taiwan's sovereignty to trade for unrealistic economic benefits" in terms of closer ties with China.
"We must not tolerate it," she said.
Earlier in the day tens of thousands of demonstrators shouted and pumped their fists in the air as they marched through the capital city under the watchful eye of about 4,000 police officers.
Some wore yellow headbands reading "Don't Lean Towards China, Safeguard Sovereignty!"
"Ma assured the public that he would by no means sell out Taiwan ahead of the vote more than a year ago," former premier Su Tseng-chang told the crowd, his voice hoarse from shouting.
"But the fact is that Taiwan has been belittled in the three negotiations with China since last year."
The DPP said 600,000 people attended the Taipei rally, but Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin put the turnout at less than 80,000.
Thousands more marched in the island's second city of Kaohsiung in the south, where some protesters burned the flags of China and the island's ruling Kuomintang party.
Ma, who travelled to the northern city of Hsinchu, urged demonstrators "to feel at ease about the sovereignty issues."
"As exchanges with the mainland are based on the principles of dignity and equality, our sovereignty has not been sacrificed. Rather, our place in international society has become larger," he said.
Relations between Taiwan and China, which split in 1949 at the end of a civil war, had hit rock bottom due to the provocative pro-independence rhetoric of Ma's DPP predecessor Chen Shui-bian.
Nevertheless, they have improved dramatically since Ma's inauguration nearly a year ago.
The two sides have since held three rounds of talks and signed a raft of agreements that led to regular direct flights across the Taiwan Strait, a steep rise in the number of Chinese tourist arrivals, and greater cooperation.
Ma says the flow of Chinese visitors to Taiwan - from a mere trickle to more than 3,000 a day - has helped the island's sagging export-dependent economy, which has been hit hard by the global downturn.
Taiwan will for the first time in nearly four decades attend a meeting of the World Health Organisation's highest decision-making body as an observer this week, after years of Chinese opposition.
Taiwan Health Minister Yeh Chin-Chuang was in Geneva for the meeting set to open on Monday.
Ma has called the development his administration's biggest achievement to date.
But the DPP has repeatedly accused the president of selling out to Beijing despite his pledge of "no unification, no independence, no use of force" during his time in office.
China has repeatedly threatened to invade Taiwan should the island declare formal independence.
Chen, who left office last year after a maximum two terms, is now in prison on corruption charges which he says have been trumped up by the Ma administration.
On Friday Chen ended a hunger strike launched about 10 days ago in protest at what he says is a political witch-hunt against him by Ma's government, one of his aides said.
Chen had initially intended to carry on with the strike through Sunday in a show of support for the DPP-led rally. - AFP/de
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