Odds and Ends from the News

A Canadian teacher here lets everyone know that in Taiwan is paradise in a local Canadian newspaper.....

But it is not all bad here. The people are friendly and gentle, there is hardly any petty or violent crime, and the women love white men. It’s also pretty cheap to live here.

.............

That’s probably the biggest contradiction about this place. Although the laws appear oppressive, there’s actually more freedom here than in Canada, mostly because the police don’t do anything.

You can ride a motorcycle with nar licence nor helmet. You can go out and buy fast food, hundreds of varieties, at all hours of the night. You can drink beer on the street and there’s no problem.

Er...I'd like to thank our friend from the Frozen North for not reinforcing any stereotypes about white foreigners. Heh. On a more serious and reflective note, Taiwan's food situation is looking a bit dodgy, according to this commentary in the Taipei Times:

Taiwan’s food self-sufficiency rate is based mostly on rice and grains. But in the past 10 years the rate has fallen steadily from 55 percent down to 44.5 percent, and the rate for wheat and corn is less than 10 percent.

Although the self-sufficiency rate for meat is 72 percent, the rate for pork and beef is less than 10 percent, showing that food supply depends for a large part on imports, making it very susceptible to the global food crisis.

Faced with global food shortages and the long-term rise in prices, Taiwan should make a plan for putting some of its more than 220,000 hectares of unused farmland back into agricultural use. Also, it should use biotechnology to develop genetically modified crops that suit the country’s soil and climate in order to achieve a large-scale increase of crop production and reduce its dependency on imported food.

Currently, seafood is the fastest-growing source for animal protein. Raising fish is now even more profitable than raising pigs, sheep, cows or chickens.

China is asserting its claim to the areas around it by attempting to influence the way search engines and maps depict its colonial projects. As this report observes:

Many online services run into problems when they are introduced into new countries, and mapping services are no exception. Sensitive information, such as the location of certain government buildings or details on military bases, often show up in satellite view for the entire world to see. Those are just some of the things that Chinese officials are concerned about—a concern that has prompted an investigation into a number of mapping services, including Google Maps, in hopes of having the maps removed or altered.

China's State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping told Chinese-language paper the People's Daily that it—along with the Ministry of Industry and Information, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Ministry of Public Safety—had begun the investigation in April and will continue it through the end of the year. Bureau vice head Min Yiren said that, along with military secrets, the maps offered by these services do not offer correct representations of China's borders, according to the AFP.

Some of those supposedly inaccurate representations include how disputed territory—such as Taiwan, Spratlys and Paracels islands, and the Diaoyu Islands—are represented. (The mapping services place these territories outside of China's control, which China predictably takes issue with.) When it comes to military secrets, however, it's possible that China has accelerated its efforts to shut down mapping sites after catching wind that its nuclear sites are being actively monitored using these services. The Federation of American Scientists told Ars that it has been using Google Earth to locate Chinese nuclear silos for some time, and recently used satellite images to discover a ballistic missile submarine deployed in the South China Sea.

It's always been an uphill fight to get mapping services to depict Taiwan correctly, but with China's growing clout and our incoming President here who thinks we're part of China, things will only get tougher. The person who flipped me the piece observed that the newspapers did not point out that Google and other mapping systems typically have servers located outside of China, and need not kowtow.

Finally on tap is a piece from David Shambaugh on China's two types of nationalism, the Dr. Banner type and the Hulk type:

It is a nationalism that is cosmopolitan rather than insular and xenophobic. It is a nationalism of many (but not all) urbanites and intellectuals. It is a nationalism that is proud of China's newfound role in world affairs, its new status as a major power, its permanent membership on the UN Security Council, its prowess as the engine of global economic growth, its dramatic socio-economic transformation, its lifting of 200 million people out of absolute poverty, its contributions to addressing international "hot spot" problems like North Korea, and its role as an upholder of the international order.

This is the China the Olympics were supposed to celebrate. Instead, China risks squandering its credit through its nasty nationalism.

Option three, China's nationalism is that of an emerging hegemonic power that is aimed directly at displacing the US, is not on the Establishment table yet. That nationalism is embodied neither in protests nor the Olympics, but in the submarine base that it has completed on Hainan Island. Whether it emerges as a dominant strain remains to be seen, but China's territorial ambitions in the South China Sea are certainly provocative a force for stability.

[Taiwan]