Tag: Taiwan

“And We’d Have Won Those Elections Too, If It Weren’t For You Meddling Kids!”

Loserdom runs in the family: Taiwanese electorate overwhelmingly reject Sean Lien in Taipei mayor's race

Elsewhere, a great many other KMT candidates also went down to thorough defeat

It's difficult to feel much sympathy for the KMT, given their open disdain for large swathes of the voting public. When the KMT's Honorary Chairman Lien Chan dismissed Taiwanese who lived under Japanese colonialism as "bastards", that had consequences. When the KMT had students beaten for protesting the Kuomingtang's plan for Taiwan's economic anschluss under Peking's suzerainty, the party lost votes, too.

And, to add insult to injury, the KMT couldn't resist insulting members of the student Sunflower Movement by refering to them as young people with "bad morals".

Not a wise thing to say about a political faction that brought out 500,000 students to Taipei streets earlier this year. And that doubtless enjoys support from other adults and students who didn't openly participate.

Evidently, the KMT believed its own bullshit – that since the Sunflower Movement's street protests eventually fizzled (as most street protests usually do), that the students' political concerns had disappeared as well.

Kuomingtang reports of the Sunflower Movement's demise were greatly exaggerated, then. And their campaign slogan, "Vote KMT – Because we're BETTER than you low-life sons-of-bitches," apparently wasn't the big vote-getter that the Party's political warfare geniuses thought it would be.

Erudite Confucian-Educated Gentleman Lien Chan Curses Like A Drunken Sailor In Public Speech, Corrupting The Morals Of Innocent Taiwanese Youth

No doubt, we can all count on the China Post to condemn Lien's astonishing breech of Confucian propriety and traditional ethics.

Ah, no. I guess not. 

Senile, Foul-Mouthed KMT “Aristocrat” Lien Chan Hurls Obscenities At Doctor Who Saved His Son’s Life

Lien Chan, the two-time loser for the Taiwanese presidency, finds it unbearable that independent candidate Dr. Ko Wen-je is trouncing his baby boy Sean Lien in polls leading up to the election for Taipei mayor:

"He [Ko Wen-je] calls himself a commoner and us the privileged few, but I call him a ‘bastard.’

Taiwan's Kuomingtang. Keepin' it classy since February 28, 1947.

President Ma Ying-jeou Of Taiwan Asks The Japanese To Do His Job For Him

More Taiwanese visit Japan than vice versa, and Ma The Bumbler thinks Tokyo needs to get right on it:

President Ma Ying-jeou on Friday told a Japanese envoy that the Asian country should review the imbalance of tourist flow between the two nations.

[…]

[In a previous meeting with former Deputy Minister Okada Katsuya, the] president was quoted to have said that Taiwanese tourists visiting Japan greatly exceed that of Japan to Taiwan, and that Japan should take measures to rebalance the difference.

Perhaps it's not surprising that Ma's response to this "problem" is both lazy and incompetent. Because the most obvious solution is for his government to pony up the funds for a tourist promotional campaign in Japan.

But of course, that would take effort.

His government could also get off its duff and do a marketing study about how to make the country more attractive to Japanese tourists, and then go about following the study's recommendations.

More work, again.

Taiwanese KMT President Ma Ying-jeou sits and crosses index fingers from both hands.

(President Ma Ying-jeou makes the teenage "crucifix"-gesture to ward off the evil expectation that he do the job he was elected to do. Whined Ma: "Oh, maaaaan, Foreigner, all your proposals sound TOO HARD. Why can't I just let somebody ELSE do it, instead?" — Image from the Want China Times.)

Another option would be for his government to stop going down-market with its ardent pursuit of low-income Chinese tourists. It's entirely possible that concentrating on this niche discourages higher-income Japanese from visiting…

A different angle would be for Ma to tackle some of the anti-Japanese bigotry that the KMT fostered during its decades-long misrule of the country. I once witnessed (with my own eyes) a Taiwanese woman in her 30s walk up to a Japanese man in a bar and, unprovoked, tell him straight to his face in English, "I don't like Japanese."

(Fortunately, it was a foreigner pub, and there weren't any Taiwanese men around. The situation might have escalated quickly had any drunken, Japan-hating, Chinese nationalists been present.)

By my reckoning, that Japanese man probably told his family and a few of his co-workers about his unfortunate experience with Taiwanese hospitality. Undoubtedly, a few other Japanese later heard about it second-hand. Does Mr. Ma think that's the kind of word-of-mouth which encourages Japanese visits to Taiwan?

Finally, if Ma Ying-jeou wants more Japanese tourists (or tourists from any country, really), he could see to it that the country's legal system charges and prosecutes Taiwanese who assault tourists. His pathetic failure to do so is certain to leave a few foreign tourists crossing Taiwan off their itineraries.

Update: After sleeping upon it, I realized this post gave the false impression that Taiwanese in general behave badly towards Japanese tourists. So to clarify: most Taiwanese are cool. Really cool.

However, Taiwan has a very small, ugly minority (who usually prefer to be called "Chinese") which rabidly hates Japan and all things Japanese.

Having made that qualification, an encounter with even one of the latter is enough to ruin a vacation…

UPDATE (Aug 31, 2014): With more temperate language, the Taipei Times makes much the same point.

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Unpleasant Prediction

I hope Tyler Cowen is wrong about this, but…

In Asia, the most likely future candidate for this problem [economic regression] is Taiwan, where real wages were largely stagnant from 2000 to 2011. In 2012, Taiwan’s trend was even more disturbing: Its economy grew 1.3 percent, but real wages fell 1.6 percent, both adjusted for inflation. Taiwanese capital has flowed into China, creating a new class of Taiwanese millionaires but hollowing out the country’s manufacturing base as capital was reallocated to the mainland.

There is an anti-democratic camp in Taiwan which blames the introduction of democracy itself for the country's problems – insinuating that Taiwan would be better off under a KMT autocracy or martial law. This appears to be a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, as the experience of South Korea plainly shows:

South Korea's GDP (nominal) growth from 1960 to 2007. A drastic increase in GDP coincides with the introduction of democracy in that country.

(Graph of South Korea's nominal GDP from Wikimedia.org)

Two Asian countries (Taiwan and South Korea) both democratized at roughly the same time, and yet their economic paths after democratization were very different. To my mind, the chief difference between the two is that South Korea didn't leave its own industry to wither on the vine while flooding Communist China with investment capital.

Taiwan, unfortunately, did.

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President Ma Ying-jeou Allies With Gangsters Against Taiwanese Because Constitution!

Visiting Communist Party apparatchik Zhang Zhijun (張志軍) must feel right at home watching President Ma of Taiwan brutalize the citizenry.

Using members of the Taiwanese mafia, no less – for plausible deniability. That PhD in law from Harvard sure does come in handy sometimes.

With a bloody face, a wound on his forehead and blood-stained clothing, Liang Po-chou (梁伯洲) told reporters at the square in front of the temple that he was assaulted by five or six people using steel blowpipes.

Liang said he was there with his father, Changhua County Councilor Liang Chen-hsiang (梁禎祥) of the Democratic Progressive Party, and other people trying to show Zhang posters with slogans against the cross-strait service trade agreement and slogans that the future of Taiwan is a matter for 23 million Taiwanese people to decide.

The “gangster-like people” began beating him when he was trying to argue with executive officers of the temple because he was angry that they asked staff to set off firecrackers on the streets in an attempt to disperse people who refused to leave, Liang said.

Perhaps the Strongman-In-Shortpants ran out of policemen willing to do his dirty work.

KMT President Ma Ying-jeou's mafia. Taiwanese mafia members wearing black shirts and pants stand waiting to beat Taiwanese protesting the visit of Chinese Communist Party negotiator Zhang Zhijun.

(Chinese mafia runs security for Taiwanese mob boss president Ma ("Fredo") Ying-jeou. Image from the Taipei Times.)

Professor Jerome Cohen must be very, very proud of his former student's scrupulous adherence to the rule of law.

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Seven Unpeople At Taiwan’s China Post

Profiles of seven of China's most prominent political dissidents.

Oddly enough, there's never been much mention of them in the pages of the China Post – a paper which styles itself as Taiwan's "Chinese nationalist" newspaper.

Perhaps they ran all out of ink after printing David Kan Ting's numerous fawning columns about Communist princeling Bo Xilai…

We Will Never Be Brothers

A poem by a young Ukrainian woman about the "fraternity" of Ukraine & Russia.

This is the best of the two translations I've seen:

We will never be brothers
Neither countrymen, nor blood brothers.
You don’t have the freedom breath –
We can’t be even stepbrothers.
You have called yourselves “elder brothers” –
We would like to be younger brothers, but not yours.
There’re so many of you, but you all are faceless.
You are huge, but we are great.
You press… you trudge,
You will choke on your envy.
You don’t know what freedom means,
You all are encased in chains from childhood up.
Silence is golden in your home,
And we burn Molotov cocktails,
Yes, there’s warm blood in our hearts,
What sort of blind “relatives” are you for us?
We all have fearless eyes,
We are dangerous without any weapons.
We grew up and became courageous
We all are at the shooters’ gunpoint.
We were forced to our knees by the hangmen –
But we revolted and corrected everything.
The rats are hiding and praying for nothing –
They will wash themselves with their blood.
You have new instructions –
And there’re revolt lights here.
You have your Tsar, but we have Democracy.
We will never be brothers.

"What is this doing on a blog mostly about Taiwan?" you might ask…

China Attacks Vietnam’s Ships, Steals Vietnam’s Resources: Taiwan Hardest Hit

Last week, China began constructing an oil rig within Vietnamese waters to steal crude from the third world nation. Vietnam responded by sending ships to the area, which were promptly attacked by Chinese vessels:

Chinese ships have been ramming into and firing water cannons at Vietnamese vessels trying to stop Beijing from putting an oil rig in the South China Sea, according to officials and video footage Wednesday, in a dangerous escalation of tensions over waters considered a global flashpoint.

Just today, Vietnamese mistakenly took out their frustration on Taiwanese factories:

Thousands of Vietnamese set fire to foreign factories and rampaged in industrial zones in the south of the country in an angry reaction to Chinese oil drilling in a part of the South China Sea claimed by Vietnam, officials said on Wednesday.

The brunt of Tuesday's violence, one of the worst breakdowns in Sino-Vietnamese relations since the neighbours fought a brief border war in 1979, appears to have been borne by Taiwanese firms in the zones in Binh Duong and Dong Nai provinces that were mistaken for Chinese-owned companies.

[…]

Gates were smashed and rioters set 15 factories on fire…

China cannot expect Vietnamese to respect Chinese property rights while the Chinese blithely violate theirs.

But it's a shame that this perfectly-understandable anger was taken out on the Taiwanese, though. Because (as readers of this blog are no doubt aware): Taiwanese are not Chinese.

In vain, Taiwanese companies themselves belatedly scrambled to communicate this elementary fact:

Some Taiwanese firms had spray-painted messages on the road and across their gates saying "We Support Vietnam" in an effort to distinguish themselves from Chinese enterprises.

Perhaps the current government of Taiwan might have alleviated the situation if had spent less time pretending to be China, and concentrated its efforts on sending the message that Taiwan is a completely different country altogether.

Without such efforts, Taiwan will always be unjustly blamed for the crimes of the Chinese. And the Taiwanese government will be forced to pay to evacuate its citizens whenever tempers erupt over cases of China's villainy.

As Aesop might've said:

Those who impersonate international outlaws are often mistaken for international outlaws.

UPDATE: You speak the truth, sir!

“We have to establish a distinct identity [from China],” Mr. [Antonio] Chiang said. “Or not only will this happen in Vietnam, but other countries, too.”

UPDATE (May 18/2014): Others see Taiwan's One China policy as a contributing factor.