Some great stuff here. The Sullivan/Sapir article is really good and you should track down Sullivan's articles on Chen Shui-bian's discourse, which I keep forgetting to blog on. Sullivan loves Taiwan and is a very insightful writer and thinker. The Schubert "analysis" of the election is basically a Grand Narrative Establishment rehash (you're probably better off with mine). The European integration piece is quite balanced all things considered; I haven't had a chance to read the others.
Journal of Current Chinese Affairs
OPEN ACCESS
Content alert: Issue 3/2012
Taiwan under KMT Rule: Recent Trends in Domestic Politics and Cross-Strait Relations
Introduction
Gunter Schubert:
Contemporary Taiwan Studies in Europe: More Institutionalized, More Vital
Research Articles
Cal Clark and Alexander C. Tan
Political Polarization in Taiwan: A Growing Challenge to Catch-all Parties?
Jonathan Sullivan and Eliyahu V. Sapir
Ma Ying-jeou’s Presidential Discourse
Christian Göbel
The Impact of Electoral System Reform on Taiwan’s Local Factions
Wang Hung-jen
Liberalist Variation in Taiwan: Four Democratization Orientations
Stefan Fleischauer
Cross-Strait Relations and the Way Forward: Observations from a European Integration Perspective
Analysis
Gunter Schubert
No Winds of Change: Taiwan’s 2012 National Elections and the Post-election Fallout
__________________
Daily Links:
- NHI to cover Chinese students. As it should.
- What? Another article saying the same thing about English that's been said for thirty years?
- Under-the-Radar News from AsiaEye
- Victory? the High Administrative Court denies extension of the idiotic central Taiwan science park in Erlin.
[Taiwan] Don't miss the comments below! And check out my blog and its sidebars for events, links to previous posts and picture posts, and scores of links to other Taiwan blogs and forums! Delenda est, baby.
Here's another example. We opened a new office in taipei and promptly hired a new secretary. No-one consulted me on whether the secretary would need any English skills, despite the fact that all our products come from outside Taiwan and English is the language we use to communicate, hence my job. So this new young lady has almost no English and can't even correctly guide the caller if one of our suppliers calls us. Sigh.
ReplyDeleteMichael wrote:
ReplyDelete"NHI to cover Chinese students. As it should."
Disagreed:
1. Taiwanese students don't enjoy the same in China (nor anywhere in the world; e.g. not in Australia or Canada.) Why should Taiwan do so while rich countries such as Australia and Canada don't cover it for the Chinese/foreign students?
2. Many Taiwanese residents are too poor to pay the NHI monthly fee and have been taken out of the system by NHI (i.e. their NHI cards have been blocked.) The CSB government was pretty lenient in blocking unpaid NHI cards. The number of blocked NHI cards was about 50-60K during his tenure.
The Ma government however has been very aggressive in enforcing the rule. As well, the division between wealthy and poor has dramatically widened in the last four years. The number of blocked NHI cards has increased to 600K (based on the reports of Liberty Times and Apple Daily.)
These poor Taiwanese (some of them being students) are not covered by NHI and yet they are paying tax directly or indirectly to subsidize NHI. Do they have less right in their own country than the Chinese students?
Although in Nov, 2010 the Ma government did unlock the cards for children (younger than 18 years old) and announced that hospitals cannot deny medical emergency service to people whose NHI cards are blocked. Still, it means that these poor people have to wait until their health problem becomes a medical emergency to get some degree of medical attention.
Here is a report (in Chinese) of Nov 18, 2011 about a 28 year-old Ms. Lai who had a miscarriage at the end of Sept 2011 and suffered from postpartum hemorrhage for over a month. During the time, she did not seek medical help because her NHI card was blocked due to missing NHI fee payments. As a result, she died at home of massive hemorrhage in Nov. 2011. (For the news piece, see this link.)
Before the government goes ahead and provides the coverage for the Chinese, they should take measures to help these poor Taiwanese citizens stuck in a health (non-)insurance dilemma.
3. Many Chinese "students" are sent to Taiwan by the Chinese government. Basically, the new measure would knowingly cover the health insurance of such Chinese spies in Taiwan.
The Taipei Times piece by Chang Sheng-en not only makes the same old arguments about English, it continues the national obsession over the country's standing in relation to South Korea.
ReplyDeleteIn my message at 5:01 AM,
ReplyDelete"...(For the news piece, see this link.)"
The link does not seem to be enabled. Here is the URL in plain text:
http://www.libertytimes.com.tw/2011/new/nov/18/today-so2.htm
The headline of the piece in Chinese was: "健保被鎖卡 死胎沖馬桶／女血崩死家中 腹中還有一胎" (i.e. "NHI card blocked, still-born flushed in the toilette ／Woman died of massive hemorrhage at home with one more fetus intact in the womb")