Lee Ming-che gets 5 years: Reactions

The excellent little memorial museum to the Tapani Revolt of 1915 in Yujing, Tainan.

Lee Ming-che, the Taiwanese democracy activist who was detained in China, has been given a five year sentence after his show trial earlier this year. The Guardian observes:

A court in China has sentenced a Taiwanese democracy activist to five years in prison on subversion charges in a case that has strained relations between Beijing and Taipei.

Lee Ming-cheh sat silently as a judge read the sentence, accusing him of disseminating articles, books and videos critical of China’s Communist system in an attempt to foment a “western colour revolution”.

Taiwan’s presidential office called the verdict “unacceptable”, adding: “We urge the Beijing authorities to release Lee and allow him to return to Taiwan soon. We regret that Lee’s case has seriously damaged cross-strait relations”.

AFP turned out an outstanding report on the sentencing, themed on human rights and democracy:

His wife, Lee Ching-yu, who attended the sentencing, said her husband had "paid the price" for his ideals.

"Fighting for human rights for the disadvantaged is a commitment that must be made to push for the enhancement of human civilisation... I want to express again that I am proud of his dedication," she said in a statement.

Amnesty International East Asia research director Roseann Rife called for Lee to be "immediately and unconditionally released", saying he had committed no crime.

"Lee Ming-cheh is the victim of a politically motivated prosecution... He is the latest to suffer under the Chinese authorities' relentless attack against human rights and democracy activists," Rife said.

The NYTimes also turned out a sympathetic and detailed report.

J Michael Cole observed in a piece for the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy:

Lee is the first Taiwanese national to be sentenced for such a “crime” in China under the new National Security Law which passed on July 1, 2015 and which stipulates that preserving the national sovereignty and territorial integrity of the People’s Republic of China “is a shared obligation of all the Chinese people, including compatriots from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan.”

The court’s suspension of Lee’s political rights is no doubt meant to underscore Beijing’s contention that the new National Security Law applies to Taiwanese nationals (whom it regards as PRC citizens) regardless of where the alleged crimes are committed. We should note here that the said crimes Lee is accused of having committed occurred primarily online.

The heavy sentence is also meant to send a loud signal to other activists in Taiwan, Hong Kong and elsewhere that they, too, can now be apprehended and convicted for “crimes endangering national security” and the “people’s democratic dictatorship regime” as (loosely) defined in the Law, irrespective of where the said crimes have been committed, both physically and online.

When that "law" Cole refers to above was passed, the International Federation of Journalists warned on its implications for journalists and others from Taiwan. That warning has now come to pass.

The loud signal that China sent will be heard within China as well: a Chinese man was also sentenced at the same "hearing", to seven years.

Brian Hioe at New Bloom cautioned on the insipid Taiwan reaction:

And it also remains to be seen what is next for efforts to free Lee in Taiwan. It seems to be primarily social movement activists that have paid attention to the issue and one has not, in fact, seen mass mobilizations to free Lee. Demonstrations to date have actually been disappointingly small. New means of outreach will be needed in order to provoke public outrage to set Lee free—after all, if the Taiwanese public has little reaction to Lee’s sentencing, one imagines that this will only move China to take actions against Taiwanese citizens abroad with impunity, as well as encourage China to take actions against Taiwan as a whole.

A few things remain to be said. First, the Lee Ming-che case shows that China has completely given up on the hearts and minds approach. Beijing undoubtedly knows that Taiwan has no desire to annex itself to China. This case will make it more difficult for Beijing observers/explainers/apologists to write about how Beijing's bumbling is screwing up its ability to win hearts and minds in Taiwan. There are no hearts and minds to win now.

Second, it also shows how the Chinese border matters to the international media. Hong Kong dissidents and activists are almost never negatively portrayed in the international media. Whereas, Taiwan activists and democracy fighters, as well as Taiwan's democracy itself, are frequently portrayed as provocative and probably deserving of whatever punishment China will mete out. When Lee crossed that border, he went from provocative, exasperating Taiwanese hothead to tragic hero dissident. That double standard deserves to die. Anytime, media.

Finally, this will be a blow to the narrative that the Tsai Administration is somehow equally to blame for the "chilled relations" between Beijing and Taipei. One of the outstanding moments in the AFP piece above is that it assigns Beijing blame for cutting off relations with Taipei. This sort of thing will give editors and writers more courage to take that position when they describe Beijing-Taipei relations. After all, Beijing very obviously doesn't care about its relations with Taipei.
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Daily Links:

• The Lee case occurs as professor warns of self-censorship in Taiwan churches to please China to retain access, and news breaks that Chinese are co-editing textbooks used in Taiwan high schools.
• China fears a stab in the back from India if it attacks Taiwan
• Taiwan's "secret" surfing paradise is getting attention. As if it wasn't in every guidebook.
• Humor from the Global Times: Taiwanese youth hostility to China is a myth.
• Tourism as a territorial strategy in the South China Sea. Another good one from Ian Rowen.
• Banks say no to Ching Fu loan extension, meaning that they will probably eat $600 million US dollars in Ching Fu debt. What a disaster for the nation's finances and defense. 
• NHS to adjust outpatient care in the wake of the new labor law
• Offshore wind advances

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[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!

Cycling Tainan: Uplands and Badlands

My friend Blair Hargreaves snapped these boars waiting for the inevitable end.

Another weekend, another bike ride. This one took us to the back roads of Tainan, including the gorgeous 175 and the strange Moon World, one of the few tropical badlands in the world. Short days, but super enjoyable. Click on READ MORE to see moar pix and the route notes for day 1 and day 2...

Yes, AmCham, the cram school market is saturated. It reached that point a decade ago....

AmCham passed around this Taipei-centric piece on the cram school market, arguing that it had reached its saturation point. Quite true, it had reached it over a decade ago. The article observes:

Yet some cram schools (buxibans) would at times bend even those limited requirements for the right candidate. Doing so was illegal, but the demand for instructors of English as a second language (ESL) often outstripped supply as the industry grew at a torrid clip. From 2003 to 2008, the number of cram schools more than doubled from 6,000 to 12,500, according to the Ministry of Education (MOE). In the Taipei area, most qualified teachers preferred to work in the city or nearby suburbs accessible by subway. A bit farther afield, schools couldn’t afford to be picky.

.....

Growth has slowed as well. Between 2008 and 2016, the number of buxibans expanded from 12,500 to 18,500, half the rate of the preceding five years. Since 2016, growth has been flat.

“Business has been tough for a while,” says Jocelyn Lu, director of the test-prep and study abroad consultancy Cambridge Taipei. In recent years, student enrollment at Cambridge Taipei has been dropping 10-15% per year on average. Profit margins are razor thin, especially after the company felt the need to reduce its tuition fee by almost one-third.

This article is years behind the curve. Feiren, one of the more acute observers of things Taiwan, observed back in 2010....

But I did find stats on the number of teachers here with work permits and was surprised to learn that in 1992 there were just 1,500 teachers here on work permits. Now at that time they had just begun issuing work permit and residence cards to teachers and most teachers still flew to Hong Kong every six months. But as late as 2000 there were still only 3,800 foreign teachers legally residing in Taiwan. That figure peaked in 2004 at 6,831 and stayed above 6,000 until June of this year when it declined to 5,749. In October there were 5,946.

...

Another interesting set of figures from the MOE is the percentage of household income that can be allocated to education. The average figure peaked at around NT$48,000 in 2004 and decline to NT$42,500 in 2009. There was a drop of more than 10% in 2008. That tracks the declining number of English teachers over the same period by almost the same amount c. 11.5%.

That was Feiren writing in 2010. You can see why the 2003-2008 period saw an "expansion" of bushibans, which at that time was more like the swelling of a corpse, for the market had already been killed. Household incomes had less money to put into education after 2009, and of course under Ma worker incomes receded back into the 1990s. The "expansion" thus took place in a market with a stable population, meaning that while there were more schools, they had fewer students.

"Razor thin" profit margins had been around for a while, for I noted the death of the market back in 2005 (Yes, this blog has been around that long) because of the emergence of perfect competition in the market in the 1990s, a common phenomenon across small businesses in Taiwan....

As the chains proliferated, the size of schools began to shrink rapidly. It is now the case that around large elementary schools in Taiwan there may be a dozen or two English schools, each serving only a few score students. Essentially a situation of perfect competition has arisen in the market, where producers are small relative to market size, prices are equal to marginal cost and marginal revenues, and everyone knows the market well. Schools must struggle to keep costs down if they want to stay alive. Growth is difficult, for if the market increases anywhere, another school will quickly open to subdivide the market. Teacher pay is a major cost component for schools. With competition intense, and everyone facing the same cost structures, it was inevitable that teacher pay should become identical and stagnant within local markets.

I was explaining why teacher pay hadn't budged in a decade (and is still stagnant). But at that time it was already possible to see the trend, with falling birth rates, stagnant household incomes, and rising income inequality.

The reason the bushiban market boomed in the 2003-2008 period, then fell off, is probably related to money returning from China via legal and gray/black channels. Cram schools are ideal ways to launder money and gangster investment in cram schools and in legal private schools is common, and of course, many a legal dollar was seeking business opportunities at  home. That 2003-2008 period that AmCham refers to was the peak of the Chen Shui-bian era boom in Taiwanese investment and profit in China. Many people invested in cram schools because they had always been a steady earner, and because entry and exit were easy, and there was a widespread perception that they were cash cows (many of my relatives were urging me to open a cram school with them, easy money!), even though all the numbers said otherwise.

Now the market is saturated (the most saturated area for cram schools is not Taipei but Chiayi). No one I know plans to open a cram school....
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The Whining, Petty World Of Chinese Nationalist Expansionism

@jonlsullivan Nov 19 The thing we often forget about the CCP is that every sphere is an ideological battlefield. Doesn't matter if its stupid memes online or Katy Perry holding a ROC flag or a Chinese youth team match in German 4th division. Absurd for us, logical for them

One of the online games I play, World of Warships, recently had an encounter with the pettiness of Chinese expansionism. The game is about to release a new set of destroyers, the Pan-Asian line, which groups together ships from Korea, Thailand, the PRC, and the ROC, since none of those nations has enough ships to fill out several lines of a full fledged navy over the games's period from just before WWI to just after WWII.

The new line was initially released with the Republic of China boats flying the Nationalist Flag. The Longjiang, which was ordered from Germany in 1913 for the ROC and designed but never built, thus carries the ROC flag.

Despite the historical reality of the Republic of China being the only China during that period, and the simple reality that ROC ships carried ROC flags in the postwar period, Chinese wumao yammerheads complained to their embassies in Europe, which duly complained to WarGaming, the company that operates World of Warships. WG responded not by censoring the ROC flag, but by removing all the national flags -- including those of Thailand and Korea -- and replacing them with a meaningless generic Pan-Asian flag.

World of Warships has its own Chinese server which is separate from the other servers in Southeast Asia, Europe, North America, and Russia. That server is a separate business from the other World of Warships servers, as it operates under Chinese "law". Chinese players thus cannot see the North American, European, Russian, or Southeast Asian servers unless they are resident in those countries. So the only people affected by which flags the ships carry are people who are... not Chinese.

I am happy to report that this decision was greeted with overwhelming negativity (non-scientific poll of North American server discussion forum). The company was roundly criticized. The Koreans were especially upset since they finally had a ship in the game with its very own Korean flag, which was suddenly whisked from them by Chinese whining. It is possible to use "mods" (add-on programs) which can alter the appearance of the ship, to add the proper flag, but only the player herself can see that.

WarGaming is making the flag customizable, so you can add whatever flag you want. I will certainly be flying the ROC on my ROC navy ships. Giving the middle finger to the whining insecure wumao horde just makes it that much tastier.

This isn't the first time and increasingly, won't be the last, that China attempts to alter historical reality and to insert its politics into every last trivial thing.

China's soft power, hard at work, making friends for the nation everywhere....
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[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!

NPP, DPP, KMT: An Eternal Golden Braid

Hittin' the road again this weekend after a week struggling with the flu.

Watching corporate power gut the US economy and in the latest piece of predatory success, internet neutrality, would make me cry, if it didn't make me laugh. Americans will soon be paying even more for less service, while here in Taiwan, we get unlimited internet for peanuts, stable and fast. My friend and sharp observer Aaron Wytze used Taiwan's superior internet service to tweet:

1. NPP released their 2018 party strategy: party plans to run candidates in 19 of Taiwan's 23 electoral areas. Big pushes in Central, South, and East Taiwan. #Taiwanpoli https://www.facebook.com/newpowerparty/photos/a.891139534290737.1073741828.891084220962935/1873460272725320/?type=3&theater

2. oops. 22 electoral areas (municipalities and counties)

3. First observations: No surprises, NPP fielding a lot of candidates in big urban areas like Taichung, Kaohsiung, Taoyuan, New Taipei, Taipei, and Hsinchu.

4. Surprising to see NPP run candidates in rural counties like Yunlin, Changhua, Taitung, and Pingtung.
5. HUGE push in Hualien. NPP perhaps looking to pick up young indigenous votes? Any truth to rumors that Kawlo Iyun for Hualien mayor?

@Rusted_Van Replying to @aaronwytze
DPP's recent labour standars act revision push is resulting in a lot of livid young ppl (including yours truly); the timing is ripe for NPP's picking. I'm curious how this dynamic will play out with the 本土陣線 the SDP is forming tho.

IMHO the NPP is aiming at traditional DPP areas like Yunlin and Pingtung because it wants to cannibalize DPP votes, or even more likely, to threaten to cannibalize such votes and cost the DPP seats, so that the DPP is forced to make a deal with to give it at least some safe seats in exchange for withdrawing some candidates. This wide action is about leverage. Note that the NPP did well in traditionally KMT areas last time, which may account for its taking a shot a Hualien.

Word has it Su Tseng-chang is considering running for New Taipei City position. He did well when he was county chief of the area. But he is old... meanwhile everyone has agreed that air pollution will be the next big issue for the 2018 elections in Taiwan's no.2 city, Taichung. Hahaha. That won't end well for the DPP. In K-town Chen Ching-mai, leading the polls, declared his candidacy for Kaohsiung Mayor. That should end very well for the DPP.

The DPP must knock out the KMT or else it risks being squeezed between the NPP and KMT. More on that in a moment....

The labor issue took an ugly new twist this week, with labor groups protesting outside the Executive Yuan this afternoon as I write these words.

The NPP filibustered the law by grabbing the podium. Huang Guo-chang, the NPP politico target of a recall whose stupid law is explained in a great post by Frozen Garlic here, complained that the Ministry of Labor gets 1000s of complaints but only investigates a tiny handful of them. Companies in Taiwan operate with impunity (as do individuals, a foreign maid fell to her death this week attempting to escape her employers). The NPP seems determined to make this its issue for the elections, since the KMT has no credibility on labor issues and the DPP seems determined to screw labor once again, having learned nothing from the history of the last two decades.

While he was at the podium blocking things, NPP legislator Hsu Yung-ming made a startling and saddening claim:

While at the podium to delay the review, Hsu also criticized the DPP for what he said was a secret deal with the KMT over the legislation.

The DPP has agreed to shelve a draft act on the promotion of transitional justice if the KMT does not obstruct review of the amendment to the labor law, Hsu said.

Selling out transition justice in order to pass anti-progressive labor law is a double whammy of betrayal and inhumanity, if true. I contacted someone close to Hsu, and they said that they had no idea whether he knew it to be true or not. So I am tentatively going with misreported/exaggerated claim. New Bloom has extensive coverage of the filibuster here. If the DPP trades away transitional justice, it relaxes pressure on the KMT, which it must have if it is going to keep that party squelched...

New Bloom also observes that despite the occurrence of the Ching Fu contract award under the Ma Administration, the KMT is attempting to pin the scandal on the DPP. Brian notes:

Ching Fu stands accused of dispersing its money in a suspicious manner between accounts in Hong Kong, Macau, and Singapore, leading to suspicions that Ching Fu may have used the money to invest in development projects in China. Given its ties with Chinese development projects in the past, some have even made accusations that Ching Fu may have leaked navy technology to China. However, Ching Fu claimed that it needed the 20.5 billion NTD loan provided to it to pursue a shipbuilding project with Tuvalu, one of Taiwan’s few diplomatic allies. The contract was originally awarded under the Ma administration. 

With 24 officers being censured for their shady dealings with the the award of the contract this week, and the company's headquarters impounded by prosecutors, the Taipei Times had a couple of stories showing how the story, pushed by the KMT as a DPP scandal, is now blowing back on the KMT.

DPP pushback on the KMT has forced KMT Chairman Wu Den-yih, who was Veep when the contract was awarded, to issue a denial that he had any influence. Wu's defense was the classic one that the Vice President has no clearly defined function so he couldn't have had any influence on the award. This is an appealing defense since his claim is true. Unfortunately, things work on personal influence in the KMT and Wu's influence was immense. So his many meetings with the head of the firm could well have meant something given his unofficial clout. The DPP noted...

DPP spokesperson Ho Meng-hua (何孟樺) said that Wu’s denial and deflection betrays his concern about the incident and that he cannot give a straight answer about his involvement with Ching Fu.

[Ching Fu head] Chen was the only person from the private sector to attend four state banquets that the administration of former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) held for foreign dignitaries, Ho said, adding that Chen and his wife shared a table with Wu at one of the banquets.

Chen visited the Presidential Office Building twice when Chien was Cabinet secretary-general, Ho said, adding that the visits coincided with Chien’s meetings with banks on the syndicated loan and its amount.

The salience of these points should not be lost: Wu himself argued elsewhere  that Chen's ability to get close to Tsai Ing-wen signaled that he was well known either to her or her guards. Yet here is Chen in close proximity to Ma, repeatedly.

The strange and suggestive nature of Ching Fu's success in getting money out of the government...

DPP Legislator Wang Ding-yu (王定宇) pointed to flaws in the tender process and subsequent program management by the Ministry of National Defense, which “revived” Ching Fu from potential disqualification.

Ching Fu, which in 2014 was awarded the NT$35.8 billion (US$1.19 billion at the current exchange rate) contract to build six minesweepers as part of a domestic warship program, secured the contract after the ministry lowered the minimum asset requirement for bidders from one-10th to one-200th of the contract’s value.

That year, a ministry tender review committee — without its convener and deputy convener present — drew lots to pick a contractor for the minesweeper program, with Ching Fu securing the contract over CSBC Corp, Taiwan.

In 2015, Ching Fu failed to acquire export permits from its subcontractors, Italian shipbuilder Intermarine and US defense firm Lockheed Martin, but the ministry did not dissolve its contract, despite the failure.

State-run banks approved a syndicated loan of NT$20.5 billion to Ching Fu, even though the company was determined to be financially unstable, Wang said.

DPP Legislator Chuang Ruei-hsiung (莊瑞雄) questioned how Ching Fu, which has registered capital of about NT$500 million, was able to secure a tender worth NT$35.8 billion.

When you hear complaints about Tsai Ing-wen and Ching Fu, remember, all this happened under the Ma Administration....
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Daily Links:

• Australia caved to China pressure, put FTA with Taiwan on hold. Shameful.
• New Bloom: Despite Occurring Under Ma Administration, KMT Attempts To Pin Ching Fu Scandal On DPP. An old game, whose appeal never runs dry.
• Tourists from other countries delighted to find that China has banned group tours to Palau and the Vatican in an obvious anti-Taiwan move. Tsai Ing-wen just tweeted that more flights to Palau will be added in 2018, which may have something to do with China's move.
• Unemployment falls, export orders rose again for the 15th straight month. 
• Can Taiwan be turned into a fintech hub. Hahaha. Nope. Our banks are hideously conservative, dealings with the outside world are painfully slow and inefficient, in ROC years its just the early second century, many computer systems here won't even accept foreign ID numbers, online banking is hemmed in by regulations, and many people bank at the post office.
• Ann Heylen on language in the study of Dutch Formosa
• Taiwan 23 in world and third in Asia for attracting talent? Don't think so.
• Taiwan Today features the Forward Looking Infrastructure Plan
• Developing Taiwan Studies as a diverse field
• Can Taiwan be a US gateway to SE Asia?
• Ian Rowen's latest work on Chinese tourism as a territorial strategy is out
• Barry Martinson interviewed about his time on Orchid Island in the old days
• Why China can't conquer Taiwan in a war

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[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!

Book Review: Outcasts of Empire: Japan's Rule on Taiwan's "Savage Border," 1874-1945

Outcasts of Empire: Japan's Rule on Taiwan's "Savage Border," 1874-1945
Paul D. Barclay (Author)
Asia Pacific Modern
Philip E. Lilienthal Imprint in Asian Studies
University of California Press, 2018


In Outcasts of Empire: Japan's Rule on Taiwan's "Savage Border," 1874-1945, Paul Barclay tells this story, beginning with the Wushe Rebellion in 1930 led by Mona Ludao...:

The invasive and exploitative policies that provoked Mona and his confederates also eroded precolonial forms of social organization, authority, and ritual life among Taiwan’s indigenes. As it severed bonds between indigenes and their lands, in addition to prohibiting or reforming folkways it deemed injurious to its civilizing mission, the government-general nonetheless laid the groundwork for the emergence of Taiwan Indigenous Peoples as a conscious and agentive historical formation. By arresting the diffusion of Chinese language and customs into Taiwan’s interior, restricting geographic mobility across the so-called “Savage Border,” dividing the colony into normally and specially administered zones, and sanctioning a battery of projects in top-down ethnogenesis, the government-general inscribed a nearly indelible “Indigenous Territory” on the political map of Taiwan over the five decades of its existence.

...and tells it in narrative that is at once highly readable, deeply informed, illuminating, and sensitive to the humanity of every historical figure who appears in it. You can imagine my happiness in this age of unaffordable scholarly books that the book is available for free download. My deepest thanks to Dr. Barclay for not only writing this excellent book, but also for letting it be freely available.

Barclay's tale begins with the drama of the Wushe uprising, using it as a wedge to pry open the relations between the Japanese colonial state, run "on the cheap" as he frequently points out, and the original peoples of the island. Every aspect of their existence presented a quandary for Japan. Taiwan was that nation's first colony in a world of colonies and colonizers, and there was no reserve of experienced administrators and explorers that Japan could draw on. The nature of the aborigines themselves was elusive and the incoming Japanese state had only the most rudimentary body of knowledge about them to draw on. Moreover, the high mountain areas were inaccessible and unknown.

For the Han settlers on the plains Japanese rule was simpler. The initial period of Japanese rule was marked by rebellion after rebellion, ending with the crushing of the Tapani Revolt in 1915. This revolt complicated relations with the aborigines, since it drew off colonial resources urgently needed to extend Japanese rule into the highlands.

After that period of revolt in which the population was ruled via state brutality and terror, the settler population was ruled via what Barclay, drawing on existing theory, labels the "disciplinary state". The settlers could gradually be educated and disciplined into internalizing state-sanctioned behavioral norms and producing a surplus that could both fund the colonial government and provide some return on the massive investments of the Japanese state for the new colony.

However, this approach could never work for the peoples residing in the highlands of Taiwan. The colonial government simply lacked the resources to enforce disciplinary rule in the highlands of Taiwan. Thus, in Taiwan, as in so many other areas, the incoming colonial power created two areas: one where its disciplines could be enforced and the population gradually assimilated at least some of the expected norms, the other a special administrative district where peoples were exempt from the power of the disciplinary state and instead interacted with it in other ways. Those latter areas are what we call indigenous areas today. In Taiwan "the indigenous areas", like so many other aspects of Taiwanese life from the use of Penglai rice to Taiwanese deep sea tuna fishing practices, are constructions of the Japanese colonial state.

The story thus begins with the Japanese state's attempt to communicate, study, and trade with the peoples of the area. At first, because it was weak and underfunded, and its knowledge of aboriginal communities was poor, it had low-ranking colonial officials and soldiers marry aboriginal women and act as brokers between the state and its perceived subject peoples, and it conducted trade through intermediaries. These arrangements gave aboriginal leaders leverage, which the state found odious and obstructionist. Unlike the Japanese, the aborigines were experienced in handling imperial rule, and Barclay repeatedly notes how the frontier was a fluid place filled with hybrids: aboriginal leaders who lived in Chinese houses and acquired Han wives, Han who moved easily between the two worlds and spoke the languages of both, and flows of gifts and resources in both directions.

Eventually the state acquired enough power to dispense with such makeshifts and came to rule more directly. The broker-buffer and the power of aborigines to impose at least some limited terms on the colonial state's desire for profits and resources were a cost the state became unwilling to tolerate in its capitalist quest for the resources of Taiwan's mountains. In telling this history, Barclay never loses sight of that simple fact: the purpose of Taiwan, like every colony, was to make money for the "mother" country.

Every aspect of this book, from its copious illustrations, maps, and photos, to its insistence on  proper representation in labeling aborigines with their aboriginal names along with the other names they were known by, to its deep empirical and theoretical understandings of colonial processes and racial hierarchies, is an absolute delight. A Japan scholar, Barclay always has one comparative eye on developments in Japan -- the colonial processes to assimilate and suppress Taiwan were mirrored by similar processes in Korea, and by the Japanese state's ongoing program to create a state and a language at home out of its own unruly and variegated peoples. These programs frequently intersected, for example, when the State moved to ensure its low ranking soldiers and privates, often drawn from marginal and under-educated populations at home, instructed the aborigines in the "right" Japanese language forms.

Barclay points out that a key factor in the creation and preservation of an "indigenous" area in Taiwan was the deep appreciation of aboriginal artistic powers in Japan. This provided motivation for the state to research, construct, and produce aboriginal identities, and preserve a separate territorial and cultural space for them. Today aborigines in Taiwan are dependent on these Japanese representations and constructions of aboriginal lifeways in "recovering" their past practices and traditions.

Barclay's book is timely as well as informative. In the ceaseless struggle over local identities Taiwan's aboriginal peoples, today as yesterday, remain useful for demonstrating that Taiwan is different from Some Other Place. That they are so useful for such goals was both a purpose, and a legacy, of the Japanese colonial state in Taiwan.
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[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!

Volare Novels: A Novel Start Up

The halls of mystery, where true warriors may suddenly appear....

Last week I got a very interesting email from a young woman who runs a very interesting company, seeing if I would be interested in her company’s interesting story. I was.

I met etvolare of Volare Novels in a bookstore cafe, appropriately enough. Her business, now one year old, is one of the few in a niche which was completely unknown to me: her company translates Chinese martial arts novels (武俠小說) into English and then hosts them on the company website, where they get nearly 20 million hits a month. Clearly there is a huge appetite in English for these stories.

This is not a small market, and etvolare's company is one of the Big Three publishing houses. She's also the only Taiwan-based business in this market, working with a variety of Chinese literature companies and directly with authors. The biggest publishing house in this market gets over 100 million hits a month.

The novels, etvolare explained to me, are serialized, with translators churning out a new chapter of roughly 2000 words every day or so and posting them to the sites. When I wondered aloud about whether I could write one, she laughed and said it's tricky: you have to leave the audience with a story that brings them back the next day for more, but if you write too many cliffhanger endings to chapters, the audience deluges you with angry letters. Her translators include both amateurs just starting out and professionals with major books and movie and TV work on their resume.

The novels are selected for quality but fundamentally, they are selected by the translators, who like them and want to translate them. This enthusiasm and passion is shared with the audience, who respond in kind and can leave more than a hundred comments on each chapter. She has a team of 30 translators scattered around the world. She herself has chosen many novels, and likes to have a selection of offbeat genres and unusual twists, describing Volare Novels' selection as "eclectic". Volare also has a "significant focus on alternative and women's interest novels." In China, she said, this world is not primarily divided by genre (comedy, horror, mystery) but by gender first: male (pretty much everything not romance) and female novels (romance tinged martial arts, romance tinged historic fiction, schoolyard romance…).

Because the stories are hosted on the net and posted frequently, they are quite flexible. This forms part of their allure, as the Chinese authors can adapt quickly to modern events and fads to incorporate them into the work. Her web-based business also emphasizes the use of not only of more conventional communication platforms like Skype to keep in touch with translators, but also Discord, a popular site with gamers (link on her sidebar).

How does the money flow in? Crowdfunding, reading donations, and advertising. Her audience is almost entirely people under 35 (hint: disposing of much disposable income hint hint) and living in Western Europe, Canada, and the US (high income countries hint hint). Oh yeah, many of these stories make great movies and TV shows, such as recent hits Princess Agents (楚喬傳), Nirvana in Fire (琅琊榜), and Just One Smile is Very Alluring (微微一笑很傾城). Hint.

At present etvolare is looking to build partnerships with Taiwanese publishers, given her local roots. Regrettably, getting the government to pay attention to what she is building is difficult. It seems likely to me that this is because etvolare's business lacks status, and so much of what the government does involving foreigners and outsiders is based at least in part on how much status such individuals or companies can confer on the government ministry they are interacting with.

In the meantime, I will be brushing up on my understanding of the mysteries of qi and Han dynasty geography. Where did I leave those Dungeons and Dragons reference books...?
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[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!

KMT on Counterattack

If wishes were horses...

The KMT is in full counterattack mode. The DPP's recent moves to put the government in charge of the irrigation cooperatives as well as its roll-back of labor rights are motivating the KMT (KMT news organ) and giving it ammunition to attack the DPP:

On November 13, KMT Chairman Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) separately received four KMT legislators, i.e., Hsu Yu-jen (許毓仁), Ma Wen-chun (馬文君), Chiang Chi-chen (江啟臣), and Lu Yu-ling (呂玉玲) in order to listen to their views on bills being reviewed in the Legislative Yuan. Two of the bills, both proposed by the DPP, intended to change the irrigation associations into government agencies, headed by government appointees, and to change township mayors from elective to appointive. Wu declared his opposition to both bills.

I already discussed the import of the irrigation cooperative changes for KMT patronage networks. The change in the township mayors will also have a profound effect on the KMT's local level networks. This is because while the higher elective levels might be DPP, in many "green" areas the local elected officials are KMT. The south is not a green monolith, but a patchwork that is a different checkerboard at every level.

By making the township mayors appointed by county chiefs, the DPP is removing the ability of the KMT to elect these individuals, and again, cutting off the KMT's patronage networks at the local level. Recall that in the municipalities (Kaohsiung, Tainan, Taichung, Taoyuan, New Taipei City, and Taipei) the mayor appoints all the city officials. Thus, in the five cities controlled by the DPP, the KMT has almost no public offices. The DPP is now replicating this for the counties, ensuring that there will be fewer sites the KMT can cultivate local politicians for higher office and reducing patronage monies to local KMT-connected businesses.

The new labor laws, which represent a vulnerability the  KMT could exploit, were it not the party of big business, were the subject of a staged brawl today in the legislature.

Another area of KMT attack is the growing Ching Fu Scandal. The latest on it has the KMT pointing out the absurdly rapid payment to the company after it requested the funds....

The funds were disbursed on Dec. 16 last year — just 10 days after Ching Fu again asked the ministry for the payment, which was quick and suggests that the office’s top management was involved in the disbursement of the funds, she said.

Considering the sheer size of the payment and that it was composed of budgets earmarked for other military services, it was unlikely that the ministry could have paid the shipbuilder without receiving instructions from upper management, Lee said.

The Ministry is allowed to re-arrange funds if it needs, within certain limits. Also this week the Ma Administration, which contracted for the ships, was also implicated:

The shipbuilder has been embroiled in a fraud scandal over a contract that it won from the Ministry of National Defense in October 2014 to build six minesweepers for the military at a cost of NT$34.9 billion (US$1.16 billion).

To finance the construction, Ching Fu obtained a syndicated loan of NT$20.5 billion from a group of nine domestic lenders led by First Commercial Bank.

However, an investigation initiated by prosecutors in August found that Ching Fu might have used bogus documents to falsify four capital increases that were required as part of the terms of the loan.

The controversy has seen DPP and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers trading barbs over who used their influence to help Ching Fu obtain the syndicated loan, of which NT$15.4 billion had already been disbursed.

Officials visiting the firm have also come under fire, though they have denied working on its behalf. The owner of the firm, Chen Ching-nan, was arrested and charged with obtaining the loans under false pretenses, which triggered the mess. The case has shaken local banks, since it appears the firm is insolvent and no funds of the massive loan will ever be returned.

The Ching Fu case may appear that enough mud is spread throughout this and the previous administration, and also because it is huge and complex, and therefore the public will perceive it to be yet another in the endless business-as-usual deals that the government engages in. But such perceptions hurt the DPP more than the KMT....

Meanwhile, as many expected, longtime KMT politician in Taipei Ting Shou-chung will enter the KMT mayor primary, for the fifth time. Ting is 63 and will be nearly 7o in 2024, too old to become president if he is elected mayor and plans to use Taipei as a base for a national bid. If he wins the Taipei mayor race, that is one more datum showing that the next president is likely to come from Taoyuan or Taichung.
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Daily Links:

• If you read one thing today, it should be Andrew Kerslake's piece on Giant bikes. Giant killed tens of thousands of jobs when it shifted production to China, one of the showpiece deals that was supposed to herald a new economic dawn for Taiwan. Of course it didn't. There's no freude like schadenfreude. I just wished it hadn't involved the shortened lives and stunted economic prospects of thousands of Taiwanese.
• IMPORTANT: Randall Schriver, longtime friend of Taiwan, is heading for DoD. By all accounts he did well in his nomination hearing, and argued for deeper Taiwan-US ties. A second possibly Taiwan friendly appointee, John Rood, Undersec'tary of Defense for Policy nominee, also has good Taiwan track record, but ended up irritating Sen. McCain and may have torpedoed his own nomination. 
• 2.3% economic growth next year, an election year
• Can Taiwan be an innovation hub and pull out of its economic doldrums? Nope, not with its archaic banking laws. It's a great place to live, but not a great place to groom a business. 
• Trump's Asia Visit: The View from Taiwan. Nope, not me, just someone with excellent taste in titles.
• Taoyuan, Taiwan's youngest, hottest metro. The current mayor of this town is doing a solid job and may well be presidential in 2024.
• Lin Fei-fan, Sunflower leader, interviewed in SaveLiberalDemocracy
• Taiwan Today on green energy in Taiwan
• China says it will give scholarships only to pro-China Taiwan students
• It doesn't matter what numbers are out there or how often they are pointed to, for a whole segment of commentators like this one ECFA was a success which Tsai has destroyed. Sucks. 

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[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!

How the labor law changes screw workers

Aboriginal performers at a resort

Kassy Cho on Twitter explains:

Currently, Taiwanese workers are entitled to 1 fixed day off and 1 flexible day off per week. If you work on your flexible day off, it’s considered overtime, and you should be paid in increments of 4 hours. i.e. 1–4 hours counts as 4 hours, 4-8 hours counts as 8 hours and so on

Employees are legally entitled to 7 holiday days a year in their first 2 years at the company, increasing to 10 days for their 3rd and 4th years, and 14 days after 5 years and so on, with a max of 30 holiday days after working at a company for 25 years

I should also preface this with: Taiwanese people are some of the most overworked people out there, with many getting off work any time from 10pm to past midnight and usually not paid for any overtime at all

Holidays are rare, and employers have the power to reject holiday requests and often do. I know because I have worked in Taiwan and experienced this myself. Anyway, here are the proposed reforms and what they mean:

Overtime pay will no longer be rounded up to four hour increments and employees will only receive pay for the exact number of hours they have worked.

Comp days are now valid for two years. Employees will no longer be able to take or get paid for any comp days they didn’t take at the end of the year but may have to wait another year before they can take the days or get paid for them

The minimum time employees have off between shifts will be shortened from 11 hours to 8 hours, meaning if you get off at 6pm, you could theoretically be called into work at 2am and have to go.

The maximum number of days employees can work in a row before a day off will be doubled from 6 days, meaning people could work 12 days straight before getting a day off.

The maximum hours a person can work a week will also be increased from 46 hours to 54 hours.

Also worth noting the fact that 7 public holidays were already cancelled with the launch of this act

All of this goes to say, employees are very concerned that these reforms could mean longer shifts and less rest in a culture that already promotes and actively encourages overwork

She ends by linking to this piece from The Reporter that explains everything (Chinese).

The massive piles of homework and the cram schools exist for a couple of reasons. One is politics: students can't develop interests outside school or engage in political activity if they are loaded down with homework and thirty hours of class each week.

But the other is to habituate students to their future work lives in which their time will be controlled by the one with authority over their lives -- first the school, then their boss. Taiwan culture powerfully instills the idea that hard work will pay off and authority should not be challenged. These values make Taiwanese ideal workers for a slave-driving employer class.

The real white privilege in Taiwan isn't the ability of white males to get attention from local women (wildly exaggerated) or easily getting jobs as cram school clowns/teachers. It is being exempt from this hellish system of time control.

The DPP has screwed labor again, after courting it before the election. Unfortunately there is no third party labor can turn to, the NPP being too small and the KMT being the party of big business. In 2018 I expect that many in the working class will sit home while others will switch parties to punish the DPP. It appears that the DPP idea of "social justice" is limited to those areas where social justice touches on KMT power.

Recall that the miracle economy was built on the premise of cheap, well-controlled labor. This enabled families to open factories. Workers would learn skills and go off to open factories on their own, supported by networks of similar factories operating in clusters: the famous "Shoes Nest" in Taichung, the bike industry cluster around Dajia, the mold and die cluster in Sanchong, the textile cluster near Yuanlin and Hemei in Changhua, the furniture cluster in Kaohsiung (see Hsieh's Boss Island for a description of how workers spun off bosses in the old system). That system was also premised on links to the US economy via exchange students, emigrants, and political exiles.

The US middle class has been destroyed, and the workers can no longer accumulate the social and financial capital to open their own tiny factories with so many firms moved to China, but the Taiwanese family run factory business lives on, a 1970s zombie in a 21st century world. The only way it can survive is by exploitation: exploiting workers by overworking and underpaying them, exploiting the environment by ignoring regulations, and exploiting females.

The move to China enabled Taiwanese family firms to continue to survive in the global market without investing in upgrading production technology and management. Now such firms are leaving China looking for marginalized labor forces elsewhere in places like Indonesia and Burma. But to remain "competitive" Taiwan firms are rolling back the pittance of labor rights in Taiwan. This will enable bosses to continue to exploit labor in lieu of investment in upgrading productivity.

Indeed, Premier William Lai's recent call for a $30,000 minimum salary was quickly "clarified" to include only large firms. It was just a nod of the head and polite meaningless words...

The productivity-wage gap in Taiwan is huge, and for bosses, seductive. Taiwan labor is among the cheapest in developing countries, relative to its productivity. Yet labor exploitation can only lead to the slow fossilization of Taiwan firm productivity and production techniques, leaving Taiwan further behind the global production curve, while talented and capable Taiwanese look elsewhere to sell their labor. "Reforms" like this hurt the island by feeding the brain drain while convincing small and medium sized firm owners that they can go on indefinitely substituting labor for capital in the productivity race...

Perhaps the bosses are hoping that they can exploit workers until robots become widely available, capable, and cheap, but I doubt they are that forward looking. Rather, this law is simply the visceral response to labor: exploit labor more, a subset of the Great Answer to all social "problems" in Taiwan society: more control.
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[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!

Reginald Kann's 1909 Formosa, Japan's First Colony: the land and her peoples

I know you don't have enough to read, so I took a few minutes and Google-translated Reginald Kann's Formosa, de eerste kolonie van Japan: De Aarde en haar Volken, 1909, Formosa, Japan's First Colony: the land and her peoples. There doesn't seem to be much in English on him, but Kann was a war correspondent (fought in the Boer War) who covered campaigns in Cuba, Morocco, Europe, the Far East and later, WWI. In between he wrote of his travels in the area.

I have placed the text below the READ MORE line. The photos may be found at the original link.

Party vs Party

My friend's recumbent is a big hit

Failure to reform, in different ways, was the theme for the two major parties this week. The KMT remains a Leninist party run by and for mainlander elites, despite the need for it to reform. The Taipei Times quoted former KMT legislator Sun Ta-chien criticizing the party for bypassing the primary process to nominate a budding party princeling, Chiang Wan-an, for the KMT mayoral candidacy in Taipei.....

“If the KMT gives Chiang this comfort zone, as mentioned in the report, by granting him the candidacy without a primary, it would only destroy Chiang,” he said.

“The most commonly made criticism about the KMT is that it is rife with collusion between local factions and the wealthy elite,” he said.

“The cultivation of talent within the KMT has been largely focused on the offspring of politicians and local faction leaders... It is something young people would have a hard time identifying with,” Sun said.

Chiang is the great grandson of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石).

In the previous election longtime KMT politician Ting Shou-chung ran against Sean Lien, the son of heavyweight Lien Chan, in the primary and was beaten. Lien was then crushed by newcomer Ko Wen-je in the Taipei election by an electorate fed up with the KMT parachuting in princelings into local areas.

Now, points out Sun, the KMT is doing it again. Chiang Wan-an is a far more congenial figure than the inept and inexperienced Sean Lien, and will likely have a much better campaign manager than Sean Lien did, but still... Ting has long worked for the KMT in Taipei, and would appear to deserve the nomination. And he has actually won elections, not coronations.

Even a primary, while better than a coronation, would not be very indicative, since the KMT primary voters are not representative of Taipei's entire voter base.

Meanwhile the DPP assault on the KMT patronage networks continues. The Taipei Times reports on the government's plan to take over the irrigation cooperatives, long a KMT preserve and long said to be hugely corrupt.

The terms of the heads of the 15 associations in Taipei and Keelung would be extended to Sept. 30, 2020, while the heads of the Taipei Qixing Irrigation Association and Taipei Liugong Irrigation Association would continue to serve until the end of their terms on Sept. 30, 2020.

The government would appoint the heads of the associations after that date, while any vacancies on association committees between now and Sept. 30, 2020, would not be filled by holding an election, he said.

All the associations would need to observe the Civil Service Administrative Neutrality Act (公務人員行政中立法), the Executive Yuan said.

By making the association heads government employees, the DPP will effectively cut into the KMT's longstanding use of these associations as patronage bases. For a fuller description of how things worked historically, see my old 2007 post on Farmer's Associations.

Sadly, the DPP's strategy is not to eliminate clientelism, but instead to insert itself at the head of these patronage networks and eliminate the KMT's hold on them. The Chen Administration was never able to carry out its broadly similar plans because the KMT controlled the legislature through both of Chen Shui-bian's terms, but the Tsai Administration does not have that problem. Indeed, it got another law passed preventing political parties from running businesses.

Meanwhile the DPP may well get a check in the 2018 elections because of its labor policies, which are anti-worker. New Bloom observes, after detailing the changes (read the whole useful piece):

It is hard to see how these changes to labor policy will not lead to large public blowback against the Tsai administration. While outrage has already ensued in media outlets and online, this outrage will only grow when these new policies take effect.

The Tsai administration’s labor reforms last year were already widely protested by labor unions for not doing enough to protect workers, workers calling for the restoration of cut public holidays—seeing as Taiwanese workers already work the 4th longest working hours in the world—and demanding that workers be allowed two set days off per week instead of a flexible rest day in which they could still be made to work. Low punishments for breaking the Labor Standards Act also led to fears that companies that broke labor laws would get off easy under new reforms.

The Tsai administration initially waffled on its plans for labor reforms last year when confronted with resistance from labor groups, leading to large social disruption from industries that had already begun restructuring in anticipation of the new changes, then being unsure of whether these labor reforms would actually pass. However, the Tsai administration’s labor reforms were displeasing of big business owners in Taiwan, with leaders of seven business groups including the owners of some of Taiwan’s largest corporations threatening to suspend all ongoing wage negotiations with if the Ministry of Labor backed down in the face of demands from labor groups.

Once again, the familiar sight of a DPP government courting labor when it is out of power but spurning its demands when in power....

Finally, as many of us and the media had predicted, the KMT is going to use pollution as a major issue against the Lin Chia-lung Administration in Taichung, now Taiwan's second largest city, in the 2018 elections. That the pollution here is the result of the party's longtime commitment to fossil fuels and its complete failure to shift the nation to renewables, as well as the KMT's lack of enforcement of environmental regulations, etc, will not stop this from being an issue. Lin raised it himself, and now it may well backfire. I observed a couple of weeks ago:

Remember, this year Taichung has become Taiwan's second largest city. In the battleground of central Taiwan, Taichung may well become a stepping stone to the Presidency, especially if Taipei stays with Ko Wen-che so that no DPP politician is associated with Taipei, and the KMT runs or wins with an old-fashioned ideologue like Alex Tsai who is unelectable on a national level. A KMT politician who can do well or even win in Taichung has demonstrated he can appeal to the center on local issues. Presidential...

Surely Johnny Chiang, the putative KMT candidate in Taichung, must be dreaming of presidential-ness. Chiang Wan-an, the princeling grandson of Chiang Kai-shek, will never get elected outside Taipei, meaning that he is not a viable presidential candidate in a predominantly light-green/green electorate. But if Jiang wins and proves himself both competent and moderate, he will automatically be mentioned among the prospects for 2024, just as Cheng Wen-tsan in Taoyuan is for the DPP. The KMT lacks young, competent, seasoned candidates with broad moderate appeal at the moment...
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Daily Links:

• DON'T MISS: Taiwan's Green Energy Transition underway in Asia-Pacific Journal
• Realizing that Taiwan's Austronesian heritage is a source of independence justification and a reminder that the Han are outsiders, China is once again making an effort to incorporate Austronesian history into Chinese history.
• J Michael on the idiotic idea for cities to have liaison offices in China
• Great reply to Fell's piece on the Golden Age of Taiwan studies
• The Chingfu bankruptcy case will cost Taiwan banks $600 million
• A Mirage fighter crashes, pilot lost. These aging aircraft are what happens when the US refuses to sell Taiwan upgraded aircraft. 
• SCMP with a very interesting piece on the Formosan Clouded Leopard. Did it ever exist?
• Another view of the initiative: The Dangerous Arrogance of the Southbound Policy
• Lee Ming-che still not sentenced
• International Journal of Taiwan Studies wants your paper
• Taiwan, Catalonia, and the centralizing state
• Fashion as activism

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[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!

There's one in every neighborhood

Beach north of Hualien city

So last Sunday night we were left dizzy by toxic smoke pouring over our house. I couldn't sleep -- heart pounding, pulse racing. Once again, I thought, the factories below our house were burning off waste, as they often do on weekends because the EPA is closed. As if the EPA would do anything anyway. I never report them, because of fear of reprisals.

But I was wrong. Last night the fires were on again, on a Thursday night. It turns out our neighbor's ex-husband wanted some payback, so from time to time he was burning books outside his ex-wife's house in our neighborhood in order to fill it with smoke. This time, Thursday, he set a large fire and then left. Naturally, it spread as fires will, and the neighbors called the police and fire department. He came back and was busted lying to the police, telling them that he was only burning leaves. They fined him. I doubt that will stop anything.

We and our neighbors been having run-ins with him for a while. Once he parked his car in our space in front of our house. We came back with a load of groceries and asked him to roll it forward a bit so we could unload it. That evening he came out and keyed our car from headlight to taillight. Twice he attempted to run my wife off the road in her scooter. My neighbors have similar stories. The private water company we used to have supplying the neighborhood water used some ruthlessly direct methods against him a couple of years ago when he refused to pay his water bills, further complicating things.

After he got divorced three years ago, he erected a tent on the third floor of their house and lived there, refusing to leave. "Why didn't she call the police?" I asked my wife.

She spread her hands helplessly. "Taiwanese..."
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[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!

Some Links....

Tea farms and mountains. Miss these.

Enjoy some links...
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Daily Links:

• New Bloom: Should Taiwan support Catalonia?
• Tourist arrivals from China up YOY. So are overall tourist arrivals. Doing well....
• Ketagalan: Politics, China, Taiwan identity
• Commonwealth: The challenges facing Taiwan's performance sportswear industry
• The NYTimes managed to produce a whole piece on the military imbalance between Taiwan and China without saying anything new or interesting, and without an interview with Ian Easton, who just published a book on this topic. *sigh* 
• Funds flowing again into Taiwan after three months of outflows
• How China kidnapped Vietnamese fisherman and held them for ransom
• Taipei Times scolded Springer for not realizing that the China market is a chimera. After blocking academic articles in China, Springer signed deal with Tencent. *sigh*
• Wind power problems in Taiwan
• First time to Taiwan? You could win a trip!
• Ex-pres Ma in US for trip

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[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!

Marie Lin's Genetic Claims: Handle With Care

Ok, another shot of the Dong 23. Just love the opening 10K.

Genetic researcher Marie Lin's fraught claims on Taiwan ethnicity were in the news recently, provoking much discussion on the intertubes. The Taipei Times reported her claims as Taiwanese, Han Chinese ethnically distinct: expert.

Decades of research using molecular technology to analyze human DNA and genetic markers had convinced her that most Taiwanese, as descendants of lowland Pingpu Aborigines (平埔族群) and highland Aborigines have mixed blood types, and are quite distinct from the genetic characteristics of the two main ethnic groups in China, the northern and southern Han Chinese.

Lin is internationally renowned for her pioneering genetic mapping and ethno-demographic studies of Taiwan’s population, with more than 150 papers to her credit.

“The main Hoklo Taiwanese and Hakka population in this nation have Pingpu and Aboriginal bloodlines in their ancestry from centuries of intermarriage, and the analysis of DNA and genetic markers reflects this new understanding of the close relationship between Taiwanese and Austronesians and Pacific islanders,” she said.

“Through the long history of ethno-cultural evolution on Taiwan, which was isolated from other main population centers, we can consider the result as forming a ‘Taiwanese people group,’ which is distinct from the Han Chinese people,” she said.

There are numerous problems with this, and with her, like this bizarre comment:

Genetic contributions from the Pingpu and Aboriginal bloodlines gave Taiwanese the traits of adventurous ambition, open hospitality to outsiders and a positive, sunny disposition in general, she said.

My friend Andrew Kerslake outlined some of the more serious problems on Facebook in a long and excellent comment post:

The results of Marie Lin's research in the past has served to excite Taiwan nationalists and independence advocates who are seeking evidence that they are not "Chinese". This is done primarily in response to the traditional ethnic nationalisms of both the PRC and the ROC, in which both entities have conflated blood with the nation state--an idea that had its root in the anti-Manchuism of the late Qing. For Taiwan nationalist the idea Pingpu roots has been irresistible evidence of their non-Chinese identity. Sadly, this road is a dead end and Marie Lin has been unethical in her interest in periodically stoking the flames of ethnic nationalism in Taiwan.

Lin's argument is not only scientifically unsound, but it is also morally repugnant and smacks of the same language of biological determinism that has allowed generations of pseudo-scientists to promote unsound theories of eugenics and more recently to use genetics as indelible proof that indigenous peoples are fundamentally different or "flawed" by their genetic composition without ever considering the impact of layered colonialism and social projects on the lives of indigenes. We have most recently see this appear in studies on alcoholism in indigenous communities as "genetic" and the "discovery" of the "warrior gene". Both of these studies were scientifically unsound and reached erroneous conclusions that acted to uphold negative stereotypes and denigrate indigenous peoples as a whole.

Moreover, Lin engaged in dubious collection techniques that violated the rights of her subjects for her lack of disclosure and in conducting her research she took possession of biological material that she used without consent. As far as her conclusions go, I think the degree of genetic flow between Taiwan's populations is quite high. I think it is impossible to determine how much genetic material various populations in Taiwan hold from indigenous ancestors. It really doesn't matter. After about eight generations it all washes out anyway. But for the purpose of argument, there are genetic markers that show up frequently in Austronesian populations and scientists can use these markers to provide some guidance into studies of human migrations. Take O-M119 a marker for the distribution of male genes in Austronesians. O1-a1 and its mutations can be high in Austronesians. It may be an indicator. But it may not. In mtDNA markers the B4 clade and M7 are frequent. These are simple reference points. These markers show up in Taiwan and other areas populated by Austronesian speaking peoples. The catch is that these haplogroups also appear in China and SE Asia among Han, Daic, and other groups.

[MT: Yup. Southeastern China was once a stronghold of the Austronesians, who blended with Han moving down from the north after the 8th century or so. That mixed population then moved to Taiwan. So merely finding Austronesian genetic markers in a Taiwan population -- even if you could be certain they actually came from Austronesian peoples -- would not say anything about where/when those genes entered the population.]

Genetic evidence also shows that the haplogroups above are not only not limited to Austronesian, but that Austronesian speaking peoples have a high variety of haplogroups E, C, A, D...etc. The laboratory alone can not tell where one's ancestors came from or who they were or how they identified themselves. Some genetic mutations may not have occurred in every carrier. O3, O2 and O1 are all found in indigenous populations. O2 is found in Vietnam, China, Japan and Mongolia. It is also found in some Siraya. Here, Marie Lin has essentialized the gradient of human migration and attempted to conceal the variation in populations for political purposes. The only effect these haplogroups have on our lives is in how groups of people are motivated by this type of research to act. This is the likely goal of Lin and her cohorts. But as I mentioned above, it is structured along the same lines as the two major Chinese nationalisms as an ethnic nation bound by blood--a 19th century relic to support the biological reasoning behind European colonialism. If Taiwan nationalists are looking for a means to support their belief that they are not "Chinese", rather than looking for biological support from "scientists" like Marie Lin, they need only to reject ethnic nationalism wholesale and embrace a civic nationalism.

Andrew also linked to Mark Munsterhjelm's Living Dead in the Pacific, which discusses how Lin acquired her entirely negative reputation among the aboriginal peoples of Taiwan. In the 1990s and in articles in the early 2000s, Lin claimed that the Pingpu and Kavalan aborigines had disappeared, a claim that was vociferously and correctly objected to by those groups. The Pingpu and other aboriginal groups also reject the "blood"-based nationalism of many Taiwan nationalists (like Lin). Lin's work has also been challenged on scientific grounds, and the discussion on p113 of Living Dead in the Pacific is telling.

In the early 2000s Lin also argued that the Taiwanese are descended from the Yueh people and not the Han, which caused an uproar around Asia (Straits Times, scroll down). Munsterhjelm observes that her claims about aboriginal ancestry vary over time. For example, she revised them upward in 2007 to claim 85% of Taiwanese have aboriginal ancestry, up from only 26% at one point. The Taipei Times reported at the time:

Eighty-five percent of Hoklo and Hakka people have Aboriginal ancestry, according to a study on the DNA of non-Aboriginal ethnic Taiwanese conducted by Mackay Memorial Hospital's transfusion medical research director Mari Lin (林媽利).

But even then she inserted the Yueh reference, saying that 90% of Taiwanese have "Vietnamese" ancestry from what is now the southeast Coast of China. If you reflect that Vietnam has a diverse population, and that "Vietnam" is a modern construction of colonialism, imperial expansion, and historical accidents, you can see how absurd the idea of retrojecting "Vietnamese" hundreds of years into the past is.

Munsterhjelm observes that Lin's nationalistic interpretation of her genetic data not only leads her to use it as the basis for a "Taiwanese ethnicity" founded on blood, but also to defend this research by arguing that if Taiwanese ethnic ancestry is not defended by Taiwanese scientists, then outside scientists will use it to define Taiwan. According to Musterhjelm, she pointed to a 2000 report from Chinese scientists arguing that the Taiwanese aborigines are not foundational in the Austronesian language group.

Many of Lin's claims -- like her absurd claim that only 3.5% of self-identified Siraya were "pure" Siraya --- are deeply racist, based on an antiquated, essentialist view of human identity as something primordial and blood-based. Any time her name comes up, what she says about genes and identity should be handled with care.
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[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!

Nelson Report Clarification on Xi speech: possible deadline from Xi on Taiwan annexation?

Nobody let the dogs out, thankfully

From the Nelson Report, an interesting observation from Stapleton Roy on Xi setting an apparent deadline for the annexation of China. Roy, like so many commenting on Taiwan in Washington, struggles manfully not to simply say in plain speech that nobody in Taiwan wants to be part of China (they favor the status quo because it is independence). It's funny and very indicative how that has become one of the limits on all the discourse about Taiwan, including the media: few plainly state that Taiwan wants independence. Everything below is from the Nelson Report, not me, except the bolding in the second paragraph of Roy's talk....

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CHINA/TAIWAN "DEADLINE"...in re-reading last night's Report...sorry, but we managed to be fairly incoherent in describing the concerns of Loyal Readers Stapleton Roy and Susan Lawrence at the very excellent Brookings discussion of the 19th Party Conference. So here's a transcript from a tape:

Roy

Can I comment on the Taiwan aspect? Overall, Xi Jinping's comments on Taiwan I thought were moderate in the Work Report. He reaffirmed the Mainland's policy of "Peaceful Unification." He repeated Beijing's willingness to deal with anyone or any party on the basis of "One China" and/or the 1992 Consensus on One China. Now the problem there is that the President of Taiwan has not been willing to explicitly to endorse the '92 Consensus, so there's a problem there, but the Chinese policy has not changed on that question.

There was a change, however, that was significant, although not stated with urgency shall we say. In the Work Report there was a statement of realizing complete national unification is an inevitable requirement for completion of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese people. Well the goal for the great rejuvenation is 2049, so in essence he is saying that by 2049, when we're going to complete the great rejuvenation, we need to have completed national reunification. That amounts to setting an implicit deadline.

That's dangerous because we're talking about something only thirty-two years away, and the trends in Taiwan have been that there have been this enormous development and common interest to the Mainland, and there's enormous support in Taiwan for maintaining the status quo in the cross-strait relationship. But there's been no growth in support for unification with the Mainland in its current form. And so therefore if the deadline were to be held firm and we didn't have developments in Taiwan, we have a contradiction, but again we're talking about thirty-two years is forever in the American view because we can't think three to four years in advance.

Lawrence

Xi has talked elsewhere about national rejuvenation, including Taiwan's return to the Motherland, to this idea of unification, and I felt that in the Taiwan section of the Work Report, it actually was just a little bit less explicit than he's made it...

Roy (jumping in)

Well the comment he's made before that is relevant to this language is the statement that the Taiwan issue could not be left to future generations, which was taking the Deng Xiaoping comment about the territorial disputes with Japan- that they were too complicated and should be left to future generations. And he moved that into the current generation, which, in a sense, set an implicit deadline. But the difference is here he's linking it to national rejuvenation, which has a deadline, and therefore represents a step closer to beginning to say it has to be done by such and such a time.

Lawrence

Although to say he didn't sort of link them as closely in the Taiwan section. I think that's elsewhere in the Report, but the Taiwan section, he reaching out, and he's also...He's got I think the biggest applause line in the Report was, "We will never allow anyone, any organization, or any political party at any time or any form separate any part of Chinese territory from China." And that was the biggest applause line.

Hummm....so one can argue that this is still basically aspirational boilerplate in terms of the reality of the current situation, where Taiwan Pres. Tsai clearly presides over a democratically elected government...but the implications are clear, as both Stape and Susan note...

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Twofer Reports

Taitung farms

This week many people were passing around the latest the Congressional Research Service Taiwan policy report, Taiwan: Issues for Congress. An extremely useful report stuffed full of information, it mentions a key point a couple of times:

A core goal of U.S. policy has been the preservation of peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait, seeing it as central to the security of Asia. To achieve that goal, the United States has long opposed unilateral changes in the status quo by either the PRC or Taiwan. Since 1998, U.S. officials have explicitly stated that the United States does not support Taiwan independence, though they do not say that the United States opposes it.

Also out this week was a Japanese Defense Ministry White Paper which has many comments about Taiwan scattered throughout the China section....

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