Month: May 2009

Taiwan Deathrace 2009 (or, How Taipei’s Not-So-Finest Ran Over Two Senior Citizens At A Scheduled Protest Rally)

This isn't going to be the post I originally planned because one of the victims of the Taipei P.D. (a 68 year old) has had part of his leg amputated, and may wind up with brain damage.

Pretty.  Fucking.  Incompetent.

At least, that was my first reaction.  Maybe for an encore the cops could run over a couple of kids in a playground zone.

Second reaction:  This is what happens when the Taipei's law enforcement routinely undercounts the number of participants at these protests.  The men in the squad cars hear the low-ball figures, and discount the need to drive safely in the area.

Only 50,000 people?  Why, that's not so many.  We can afford to drive like maniacs only a few blocks away . . .

(Or, to use the playground analogy, which playground would you be more careful driving next to — the one which catered to a school of 50 kids, or another catering 600?)

With further information, it appears that reaction one was off the mark:

Taipei prosecutors said yesterday that based on [the driver Taipei Police Officer Lin Chien-chih's] cellphone record, he was on the phone at 7:34pm, around the time of the accident.

Lin denies being on the phone.

Prosecutors said Lin told them he was driving between 30kph and 40kph, but the broken windshield indicated the car was traveling much faster. Witnesses told reporters at the site that the driver was going at least 80kph.

Prosecutors said Lin did not apply the brakes before hitting the two men.

That's not incompetence — that's flat-out vehicular assault.  Moreover, I believe I was too quick to dismiss the initial assessment of demonstrators at the scene, who insisted that the police DELIBERATELY ran down the two elderly men.

Now that we know the police DIDN'T EVEN BOTHER TO HIT THE BRAKES, we ought to at least entertain the possibility that this crime was intentional.

Taipei City Police reacted as they usually do to such incidents.  By lying to the public:

Fang Yang-ning, head of the Taipei city Police Department's traffic police corps, said it was purely an accident.

[…]

Fang denied accusations by some other demonstrators that the police officers had purposely hit the two men.

In the absence of an official investigation, Fang was instantly and without error able to ascertain that the tragic event was PURELY AN ACCIDENT.  How fortunate for Taipei that it employs the dedicated Fang Yang-ning, who is not only an exemplary officer, but a clairvoyant one as well !

In contrast to the Move along, show's over attitude of the police, the prosecutors seem to be handling the case about right.  We'll see how long that lasts, though.  Taipei's prosecutors have demonstrated they can be a pretty crooked lot themselves, once they receive orders from the presidential office to bury a case.

UPDATE (Jun 10/09):  Surprise, surprise.  The case against police officers in the cruiser gets buried.  The winners of Taiwan's Deathrace 2009 are given the draconian punishment of a single demerit on their work record.

That'll learn 'em !

Twenty Percent, Right Off The Top

Taiwan's China Post, denouncing the country's main independence party's efforts to prevent recognition of Chinese diplomas in Taiwan:

. . . [sovereignty-minded] legislators would deny Republic of China students the right to determine their own futures.  They would deny them the right to attend mainland universities.  They would deny them the right to obtain a higher education because they could not afford the tuition on Taiwan.

Let's leave aside the irony of the China Post now posing a champion of the individual (the paper which obsequiously applauded Taiwan's martial law-era rulers as it mercilessly crushed the rights of individuals for 40 years).

No, let's instead look at the security implications of the policy.  Mr. Peabody, if you'll do the honors and set the Way-Back machine back to the 1970s:

Western liberals, politicians and academics alike saw higher-education exchange programs [with East Germany] as a chance to foster mutual understanding between the superpowers.  But for Communist spymasters such as Markus Wolf, the wily head of East Germany's foreign-espionage service, the Hauptverwaltung Aufklarung or HVA, foreign-intelligence wing of the Stasi, the programs had one use only: They served as a rich source for recruiting American and British students as long-term penetration agents who could be groomed to work their way into government jobs in their own countries — or into other influential spots in journalism, business, higher education (including scientific and technical studies) or the military.

[…]

Based on a huge cache of hitherto secret East German intelligence documents, including complete Stasi mole files of two British academics code-named "Armin" and "Diana," Insight/BBC has established the Stasi had a high recruitment success rate among American and British exchange students. "Regardless of whether these were students from Britain or other countries, as a general rule one out of 10 attempts to recruit someone for the secret service were successful," says Pieter Richter, a former HVA analyst.  [emphasis added]

There you have it.  A full TEN PERCENT of American & British students who studied in East Germany returned home as communist spies. 

What would the number be for Taiwanese students studying in China, I wonder?  Fewer language barriers.  Fewer cultural differences to work against their recruiters' effectiveness.  A "Greater China" mentality already inculcated into many of them by a Chinese nationalist educational establishment . . .

So I'll say 20%.  Yes, twenty percent.  Give or take some change.

Postscript:  I seem to recall blogging on this subject a couple years back, and that 10% figure seems to ring a bell.  Worth repeating now, now that the policy isn't just a hypothetical anymore.