Metro Killer hastily executed because politics

Band on campus.

The justice minister said it herself:

“It was I who decided to carry out the execution of Cheng Chieh ahead of other pending cases. This case damaged our society and made people fear for their personal safety in public places, so it had to be prioritized ahead of other cases. My colleagues in the justice ministry all supported this decision,” Luo said.

......

Luo also said she was doing Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) minister of justice-designate Chiu Tai-shan (邱太三) a favor by carrying out the execution.

“I know that quite a few DPP officials are in favor of abolishing capital punishment, so Chiu might have had difficulty deciding whether to carry out the order on this case. I took the decision, which is good for everyone concerned, and took the problem off Chiu’s hands,” Luo said.

Readers may recall that the poor sick lad killed 4 in the metro stabbing incident in 2014. The excellent Taiwan Law Blog was savage in its sarcasm:

As the Cabinet is scheduled to resign en mass on Wednesday, Luo will not have the opportunity to claim the title of female Minister of Justice with the most number of executions from Yeh Chin-fong, the only other woman to have held the position. Yeh executed 28 prisoners in her term during the last 15 months of Lee Teng-hui’s presidency.

Luo is doomed to be a follower. At least 3 of Yeh’s executions took place during Lee’s lame duck period between Chen Shui-bian’s electoral win in March 2000 and inauguration in May. In all likelihood, Luo will only manage to execute 1 during the current transition between Ma Ying-jeou and Tsai Ing-wen’s presidencies. Yeh was chosen as the judicial person of the year in 1999 by the Judicial Reform Foundation for being adamantly opposed to reforming the criminal justice system. It remains to be seen whether Luo will win this or other similar accolades for her extraordinary contribution to human rights discourse in Taiwan.

There's not much more you can say. Jenna of Laorencha put it best on Facebook: first society failed him, then it killed him.

ADDED: New Bloom on the case.
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Daily Links:

• DON'T MISS: Letters from Taiwan on Taiwan's Object Impermanence
• DON'T MISS: the excellent Taiwan in Cycles on Bike Policy
• Gerrit van der Wees in The Diplomat on the WHA
• Is Obama going soft on Taiwan from J Bosco
• Exports drop 15 consecutive months
• A detailed discussion of the 1992 talks from the KMT news organ shows that China and Taiwan never had any consensus. President Lee also said no such thing ever happened.
• LOL. We already need to replace some ministers.

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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!

American busted for Mary Jane

A small night market in Taipei.

TT reports:

The Changhua District Prosecutors’ Office on Friday indicted a 37-year-old US man for violating the Narcotics Hazard Prevention Act (毒品危害防制條例) by growing nearly 300 marijuana plants in a house in Changhua County’s Yuanlin Township (員林).

Please don't be stupid: the judicial system is decades behind here and marijuana is still classified with dangerous hard drugs as a dangerous drug and dealers, even low level dealers, are punished accordingly. Foreigners who come here and sell drugs usually do not operate with police or gang protection. They are freelancers  often working established territories belonging to someone else. Moreover, the police love to bust foreigners -- it enables them to feed all the local foreign tropes --- and locals are happy to sell out foreign dealers to get brownie points with the police. Although I have not heard of many busts, they typically have this same pattern -- the police get a tip-off and only the foreigner gets punished, his local friends, middlemen, and dealers aren't bothered.

Don't sell drugs here, it just ain't worth it.
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Daily Links:

• More promo stuff from gov't on biking in Taiwan. Yawn.
• Heavy rain expected later this week. Brace accordingly.
• Taiwan Talk on ICRT: Forward Taiwan on Immigration (Forward Taiwan on Facebook)
• Facebook: Taichung Improv, Sat June 21, 7:30-9:30 pm, No. 28, Yide Rd, North District, Taichung City 台中市北區育德路28號
• David Brown on the "anti-Chinese" riots in Vietnam as labor strife.
• Eddie Mayhew: BMX Life in Taipei, awesome ride sequences
• I am in love with Angelina Jolie even more now.
• Malaysia paper: Why Taiwanese investors shun Malaysia.
• China links spur Taichung growth at 9% yearly.
• This year's El Nino, if it comes, could devastate corals throughout the world.

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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!

Why doesn't Taiwan have more rage killings?

The Memorial City House of God, next to the train station in Houlong, which apparently was a hospital once.

Metro killer: 19 arrested for threatening copycat attacks...*sigh* Many people complaining that the present of police on the Metro, some with assault weapons, is not making them feel safer. One man's action has cast a long shadow over one of the world's best, safest metro systems, and now everyone must suffer.

After deploring the leap to blame various things, Daniel Lin at Thinking Taiwan observes:

Mass random killings are a form an extreme violence. Although we have yet to identify any strong predictors to explain such complex behavior, we can reasonably assume that it is driven by multiple biological, psychological, and social factors. Witch-hunts and the facile categorization they engender can discourage efforts to establish a systemic approach to identifying high-risk individuals.

In simply the best work on rage killings of the last couple of decades, Going Postal, Mark Ames did in fact identify the source of the problem: America's toxic work culture. Jeff Sparrow at Counterpunch ("Rage Killings in a Neoliberal World") brings it together...Sparrow is talking about the recent killings in California, but he could well be talking about the ones in Taiwan.

As I’ve argued before, the most interesting attempt to historicise the rage massacre comes from Mark Ames’ book Going Postal. Ames’ title reminds us that, in the US, such killings were once synonymous with postal workers (a historical fact that now seems almost quaint). That’s why he identifies the rise of rage massacres with Reaganomics: he suggests that neoliberal reforms to the postal service reduced job satisfaction, placed employees under unbearable stress and transformed workplaces into cesspits of toxic bullying.

Signfiicantly, when Ames’ interviewed massacre survivors, some expressed a remarkable sympathy for the shooters, while very few surprises at the crimes. They’d expected something to give, they said, even if they hadn’t known quite what.

Ames notes the migration of rage massacres from the workplace (in the 80s) to the school (during the 1990s), a trajectory that followed the generalization of neoliberal principles into the US education system. In their suicide notes, school shooters also referenced prolonged bullying, as the entrepreneurial values of mainstream American culture found schoolyard expression in concentrated form, and the gulf between the school’s winners and its losers became more pronounced and more significant.

Like the workplace gunman, the teenage killer embraced mass murder as a brutal and incoherent expression of social despair.

The really interesting question for Taiwan is not that we have rage killings, but why we don't have more of them here, given the long working hours, stagnant incomes, and relentlessly competitive educational and work environments. There's no single factor, but many working in tandem. Some might be....

• the lack of guns and sociocultural identification of guns with manliness and manhood
• the ruthless ability of Taiwanese to exploit themselves ever more strongly. My Facebook feeds are filled with posts from my former students, now drones at the bottom of the corporate ladder, admonishing themselves to work harder, and the general cultural belief in the efficacy of hard work
• Taiwan is still in the first generation of the class revolution that has redistributed America's wealth away from its working and middle classes upwards for the last 30 years, and the young are still to a certain extent supported by the enormous wealth gained during the Miracle Economy years.
• the educational system trains the young to accept long hours of work under arbitrary authority as normal.
• outlets: Taiwanese can relocate to China or remain in masters degree programs, since so many have four year degrees.

More could be said. I wondered if Taiwanese were more prone to suicide than mass murder, but if you look up the numbers, Taiwan and the US are pretty comparable....
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Daily Links:

• Thinking Taiwan: Problems with tolerance for minorities in the revolution?
• Cole writes about the links between the pro-democracy sides in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
• WSJ: Taiwan data suggest Taiwan, rest of Asia will see higher growth
• Taiwan Today on poll of Asian leaders from CSIS.

  A major finding of the poll is that 70 percent of respondents expect their country’s interests to be negatively impacted if Taiwan were reunified with mainland China through coercive means.Both the U.S. and Japan expressed the most concern at 93 percent and 96 percent, respectively, higher than Taiwan’s 89 percent.

• Taiwan releases aid payment to Solomon Islands
• National park number 9 to be established in Penghu
• No kidding, this is an actual news story: Captain Phillips (kidnapped off Somalia) says Taiwan boats well-equipped.
• Housing market slows, slowing construction in April, the 4th consecutive month.
• President Ma still relentlessly pushing the services pact.

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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!

Subway knife rampage? World media is all over that one.

Policeman on the subway this morning.

Unless you live in a vast, deep cave whose depths light reaches once every ten thousand years, you've probably heard that yesterday a deeply disturbed individual went on a knife wielding rampage in a Taipei Metro station (Taipei Times):

The suspect, who has been identified as Cheng Chieh (鄭捷) from Greater Taichung’s Tunghai University, allegedly started attacking passengers around him with a 30cm-long fruit knife while the train was traveling between the Longshan Temple Station and the Jiangzicui Station at approximately 4:26pm.

He was apprehended by security guards, police officers and other passengers shortly after the train stopped at the Jiangzicui Station, from where he was taken to the Jiangzicui police station for questioning.

....

“The suspect told us that he had since elementary school wanted to ‘do something big’ and that he had shared the idea with some of his high-school and college classmates,” Chen said.

Chen said Cheng originally planned to execute the idea after he graduated from university, but decided to move it forward to yesterday after giving it some thought last week.

“He bought two fruit knives of different sizes from a supermarket before he boarded the trains… His blood-alcohol content registered 0.04mg/L and he has no medical records of mental illness,” Chen said.

“He showed no signs of remorse during questioning,” Chen added.

The world media jumped all over that one (BBC, Reuters, etc). Those students who occupied the legislature for three weeks and struggled to get global media attention should have simply gone out and knifed a few people on the subway. The global media would have come running....

@TaiwanExplorer trenchantly observed that Ma Ying-jeou's sixth anniversary on the Dragon Throne in office was marked by a large quake in the morning, torrential rains that killed a couple of people, and a knife attack in the afternoon. Appropriate for the colossal failure that is the Ma Administration.

The attack, the work of a mentally ill person that in no way reflects the safety and security of Taipei (it has had no effect on my movements or use of the metro), triggered three predictable flows of sewage, the usual "if only I had a gun there/if everyone had guns", "it's those violent video games" and "those young people have bad values". Over at Thinking Taiwan J Michael Cole lambasted government shills for blaming, of all things, student activism and the Sunflower movement:

....Meanwhile the China Times, a pro-China publication that relentlessly attacked the movement throughout the standoff at the legislature, published an unsigned article berating a group of activists who have mobilized for the preservation of the Losheng Sanatorium. Their crime was to hold signs of their cause in a subway car as the murders were taking place. Only the article, which called the activists “selfish” and “cold-hearted,” didn’t mention that the group were on a different MRT line (Xinzhuang) and could not have been aware of what was occurring simultaneously at Jiangzicui Station, on the Bannan line.

This will no doubt be followed by lectures on parenting for the hapless parents. In local thinking, the first people to be blamed when a kid goes bad are the parents...

The real problem is that local society, like so many societies, strongly stigmatizes the sufferings of the mentally ill and those around them, and expects that people will lift themselves up by their own bootstraps. If only he had been reached by social workers before this. His parents explained that the kid was otaku, a social phenomenon in Japan and in Taiwan in which young males hide in their rooms and play video games all day, without friends or a realworld social life. This gave them a ready-made framework for interpreting his behavior which may also have blunted their ability to get him the help he needed....

UPDATE: David Reid points to a paper on the culture of orderliness on the Taipei Subway that will help understand the reactions to the attack

UPDATE: On Facebook longtime expat Sean McCormack explains:

After the terrible knife attack in a Taipei metro train that has left four dead and more than twenty injured, I'm seeing lots of comments from expats professing how, where they're from, the knife-welding lunatic would have been tackled before he could have done so much damage.

That may or may not be true, and respect to anybody who would have stood up to the guy.

But isn't that kind of combat-ready cultural mentality what many of us are here to escape? Battle-hardened people may indeed be more likely to attack a dangerous assailant, but a peaceful people like the Taiwanese are far less likely to produce this kind of assailant in the first place.

Don't criticize those who didn't attack the madman; they're part of the reason why this kind of horrific event is so rare here.

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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!

BREAKING: Two Detained in HSR Bombing

Two detained in Guangdong.

Taipei police chief Wang Cho-chun said the suspects were arrested by police in southern China's Guangdong province and repatriated to Taiwan Tuesday. He says police are questioning the suspects.

On Friday, Taiwanese police found two pieces of luggage each containing gas cans and timing devices on the high-speed train, and two other pieces of luggage containing similar devices at a lawmaker's office.

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Explosive Device Found on HSR?

Local puppies on the prowl. Locals sometimes warn us, owners of two black dogs, that black dogs have the sweetest flesh and thus, we should be careful lest they are kidnapped for a local dog meat restaurant.

CNN reported last night:

The Taiwan High Speed Rail Corp. train stopped at Hsinchu City after someone found the explosives in two pieces of luggage shortly after 9 a.m., according to police.

Police said the luggage was emitting white smoke, and people nearby could smell gas. The setup included 5 liters of gasoline and an activated timer device to trigger them, police said.

Investigators believe the explosives would have detonated had authorities not intervened, according to police. They said they believe the blast would have taken out one carriage.

But the TT reported today:

Police found that the luggage contained an unidentified liquid in cans and alarm clocks, as well as white particulate matter. The items were later dismantled by the bomb squad and taken to the Criminal Investigation Bureau for further examination.

Ku Jung-tseng (古榮增), deputy director of the High Speed Rail Police Division, said no detonator was found.

This is probably someone out to kill someone for insurance or similar, or a revenge attack on the HSR for some real or imagined slight. Probably not terrorism of any kind.
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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!

Murder in Taiwan

Yesterday's moon was lovely. Canon Powershot SX260 IS.

National Police Agency Statistics, Murder, total number of cases.

year  cases

1992   1,540
1993   1,622
1994   1,508
1995  1,765
1996  1,798
1997  1,712
1998  1,341
1999  1,269
2000  1,132
2001  1,072
2002  1,156
2003  1,057
2004  910
2005  903
2006  921
2007  881
2008  803
2009  832
2010  743
2011  686
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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! Delenda est, baby.

True Crime: the Justin Lee case

While the rest of the world is riveted on the Senkakus, Taiwan has been riveted by the Justin Lee case.

Justin Lee (李宗瑞), who is wanted by prosecutors for allegedly raping a woman and filming bedroom trysts with a number of celebrities and models, turned himself in last night.

......

The case has attracted widespread attention after investigators said there could be more than 40 victims, including showbiz performers, models and A-list actresses.

The scandal sparked a media frenzy because Lee is the son of Lee Yueh-tsang (李岳蒼), a board member of Yuanta Financial Holding Co (元大金控). Lee Yueh-tsang on Monday last week resigned from the company, reportedly because of the scandal.

Media frenzy! Half of Taiwan's actresses, the lurid talk show hosts claim, are waiting in agony to see whether their images will surface. The alleged girlfriend of Lee, who allegedly was hiding him in Pingtung somewhere, according to many media reports, was also wanted for drug dealing. Daddy Lee, big board member, also had a passel of children by several women, the media has reported in its best moralizing style. The media has also had fun questioning women about their relationships with him. News videos with animation here and here.

Videos of celebrities, surfacing. Surfacing how? Somebody needs to pursue the strange phenomenon of material that should be part of the investigation being made available to the public in case after case.

More tawdry: a senior police official busted in bribe case.

The prosecutors said that they were tipped off earlier this year that operators of an illegal casino, which usually moved venues between Zhongshan District in Taipei City and Sanchong District in New Taipei City, had regularly wined and dined law enforcement officers in the precincts and paid them bribes in exchange for covering up their illegal activities.

During the investigation of the bribe-taking case, while tapping the phone of a CIB police official surnamed Huang, who allegedly took bribes, the prosecutors were surprised to discover that Huang had duly reported back to his superior, i.e, Hsu Jui-shan, chief secretary of the CIB.

Hsu, who has been part of the police force for over 20 years, rose from the ranks. He has been regarded as a rising star, so his involvement in the scandal took many people by surprise.

Cases like this, so common, show, as if further demonstration were needed, the intimate links between local police and major organized crime operations. Hsu was even the head of the cross-strait crime-fighing unit..... if only the media had frenzies over this kind of system corruption...
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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! Delenda est, baby.

Makiyo madness engulfs Taiwan

What's the big story in Taiwan? You might think it is Linsanity, but when I opened the Taipei Times just moments ago, the top 5 stories were:

1 Makiyo, friend released on bail
2 Makiyo, friend charged with assaulting driver
3 Police face charges in Makiyo case
4 Watchdog urges media restraint in Makiyo case
5 Fong Fei-fei, the ‘Queen of Hats,’ passes away at 58

Makiyo was also the week's most read story at the China Post as well.

The Makiyo story is gigantic. A bare bones summary from the first story:

The Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday wrapped up its investigation into a case involving singer-actress Makiyo and her friend Takateru Tomoyori, charging both with assault and asking for four and six years imprisonment respectively over the alleged beating of a taxi driver last week.

Another taxi driver had filmed the half-Japanese Makiyo and a friend in the act of beating the driver. Two other actresses in the vehicle were also charged with giving false testimony to the police. The police themselves may face charges since apparently the tape, available at the scene, was not given to the prosecutors until after it had appeared on TV, suggesting that policemen may have been trying to suppress it.

This event has led to much breathless Taiwan media Golden Retriever style "investigation" and reporting into the woman's alleged past as if it somehow meant something. From the same story:

Asked to comment on the singer-actress’ character, some sources within the Japanese community in Taipei said that Makiyo, who is half-Japanese, was not a well-behaved student when she attended the Taipei Japanese School.

Many parents were really troubled by some of her behavior, the source said, such as kissing her boyfriends in school.

Also involved was the famous staunchly pro-KMT gangster Chang An-lo, the White Wolf (long post, shorter one). In China, Chang stuck a finger into the case to offer cash and to stir up anti-Japanese sentiment. Not to mention get his name in the papers.

The case, which has been all over the internet here, sparked public concern that Makiyo was being tried in the media. Part of the problem was that Taiwan's news market is saturated with news stations demanding an endless supply of news, meaning that the event was repeatedly in the news as the stations updated their stories throughout the ensuing days. Even worse, some of the accused appeared on TV to discuss the case though it is still under investigation. Indeed, one deponent claimed that his testimony had been orchestrated by Makiyo's talent agency....

After being indicted by the prosecutor, Takateru Tomoyori, the Japanese man who participated with Makiyo in an attack on a taxi driver, revealed in a TV talk show that it was under the guidance of the agency that he made a false statement to the police. Tomoyori had said that only he, and not Makiyo, carried out the attack. This statement led to the police's investigation into possible perjury by Makiyo's agency.

Prosecutors said Makiyo herself faces a four year jail sentence in the case, Takateru Tomoyori is looking at six years.

The drunken beat down was triggered by the taxi driver's request that the people in the back buckle up as the law now requires.... *sigh*
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Daily Links

• US pursues AIT budget increase. Yay!
• Database of Taiwan laws in English
• Economist: Taiwan exports fall, look weak for 2012
• China blocks Hong Kong-Taiwan embrace
• KMT Administration to finish Fourth nuke plant. Guardian looks at the problems with the plant. Stupid, stupid, stupid. 
• Bruce Cumings, the longtime scholar of US involvement in Asia, excerpted his new book on US naval ascendancy in the Pacific over at JapanFocus 
• The Taipei Times reports housing prices to fall, market to remain sluggish. Next year is not going to be a very good year for the economy here 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! Delenda est, baby.

Why I worry: Escapades of Daughters

Bee and bug in the backyard.

My friend calls us today. She has a daughter a year younger than my own, in the local junior high school. Her daughter, HZ, has a friend, AC. And AC has a friend too, one she met on the internet, Mr Wang Yo.

One day after many chats Mr. Wang Yo proposes to this 14 year old girl that she meet him at a designated 7-11, in her school uniform but sans bra and underwear. "I'll take you to a hotel," he promises.

Excited, AC quickly informs her friends in class, who tell her that this idea is really really dumb. Notwithstanding their appalled objections, AC then is able organize all her classmates -- some to follow her, and some to call her at designated intervals. Notwithstanding their appalled objections, they all agree to do this. Nobody tells their mother or their teacher that AC is meeting a very sick man at 7-11 for illegal sex acts, and the girls in class conceal it from the boys.

The appointed day arrives and AC is waiting at the 7-11, as instructed, a posse of her girlfriends in tow, and others waiting to call her on her cellphone at 15 minute intervals. Mr Wang Yo shows up in a car and she gets in.

HZ's appointed turn to call comes up, and she dials up her friend AC, now in Mr Wang Yo's car. My friend, standing in the kitchen as her daughter is dialing in to this little drama, listens to one very weird phone call. When HZ got off, her mother, one of the toughest and smartest people I know, demands to know what the heck that call was about. After much hemming and hawing, HZ confessed to the plot.

My friend swung into action, and alerted AC's mother. The police were called in. Fourteen year olds are not the best witnesses. Everyone had a cell phone, but nobody thought to get a picture of Mr Wang Yo or his vehicle. Two girls had the presence of mind to record the plate number of the car; one wrote it down wrong and the other wrote down the number correctly but the police later found it didn't exist. The plate was a fake.

The mother called AC again and again for three hours as she rode around in the car with Mr Wang Yo. She repeatedly refused to get out of the car with a strong bu yao! Finally, Mr Wang Yo dumped her on a corner in the science park nearby.

Luckily a policeman came along as the girl was wandering around the science park, and took her back to the local police station, where she was eventually reunited with her mother.

The next day in class this event was handled with the usual ineptitude and lack of concern for victims that seems to characterize teacher-student interactions locally. AC's teacher described what happened to the whole class, identifying AC and reaming her out in front of everyone. The boys in the class quickly learned what had happened and AC became the butt of their bullying and abuse. She was shamed in front of the whole school. This caused the girls to rally round her and extend her their sympathy, which may have been AC's motivation for the whole exercise, since AC was an unpopular girl not part of any clique, who got poor grades, and probably enjoyed all the attention.

The affair was concluded when Mr Wang Yo called AC's mom to apologize, saying he had a wife and kids too. And, by  phoning them, letting them know he had their phone number and probably could easily find out where they lived.

This tale took place against a terrifying background. Just this week a horrible tale of rape-murder emerged. Three teenage boys had taken three girls to a secluded place, killed one and then threated the other two into silence. For three years. Finally, after years of depression, they told their tale and the budding young sociopath was arrested.

Somehow there has to be a way to educate women of that age that this world is full of predators.
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Daily Links:

• Ma Ying-jeou's book/article on the Senkakus.
• Soft power for Taiwan through bicycles
• A Taiwanese explains why Taiwanese like Japan so much.
• Not Taiwan: Top Ten new species discovered in 2010. Includes Orb spider with 82 foot wide web. Way cool. Also: setting up a totally renewable power system

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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! Delenda est, baby.