Shock Doctrine: Zounds!! OMG debt SELL THE LAND NOW

Last December, just before the election, I blogged on the new aboriginal draft law which gave the appearance, but not the reality, of aboriginal autonomy. I also argued that Ma would be shoveling state assets out the door even if he lost...

I pointed to some of problems resulting from the new act and in general, development on the east coast here. This should also be connected back to the long term "shock doctrine" use of the Morakot disaster as a way to lever mountain peoples off their lands so they can be "developed" without the inconvenience of Other People's Ownership. If you ride your bike around the lower altitudes of mountain areas of Taiwan, you will run across cookie cutter style homes, like this one in Majia Township in Pingtung at about 400m, into which local aborigines are being moved from the mountains.

That too is part of the historical drive of the various colonial governments of Taiwan to move the aborigines out of their mountain homes and take over those resources.

Aborigines are a key KMT constituency. Of course, so are the big businesses that support the KMT, so it is not difficult to see why this law is going through just prior to the election. Recall that even if Ma loses, there will be a four month interregnum before Tsai takes over. Although I don't subscribe to any of the wilder theories one hears floating around about what will happen, it is fairly obvious it will be giveaway time for government assets. With this new law just in time for that....

Predictably, more shock doctrine rapes of the public treasury from Christine Liu, Minister of Finance, today, with the proposal that state lands be sold off to help out with the horror Debt Monster that threatens to eat Taiwan....

“Balancing the budget is the priority for debt reduction,” Liu said. “However, it is not easy to create a budget surplus for the settlement of debts.”

Liu added that the ministry would continue to budget repayment of principal and reduce the deficit in the future.

A Ministry of Finance report shows that the government’s overall budget deficit currently stands at NT$200 billion [US$6.77 billion].

Liu said that activating and utilizing idle state-owned assets could be an important tool for managing national debt, an indication that relaxing the limitations on public land sales might be considered.

Notice what's not there -- increased taxation on the wealthy. Laudably, the Administration has made noises about rectifying Taiwan's lack of capital gains tax and also implementing a tax on stock transactions. But fundamentally, as in the US, Greece, and elsewhere troubled by debt, the wealthy pay too little tax.

As of the end of last year, the government’s long-term debt — representing outstanding debt with a maturity of more than one year — stood at NT$4.769 trillion, an amount equivalent to 35.88 percent of average GDP over the past three years, the ministry said in a report.

If local governments’ outstanding long-term debt is included, the nation’s overall long-term debt balloons to NT$5.478 trillion, or 41.22 percent of the average GDP over the same timeframe, ministry data showed.

......

Under a definition outlined by the IMF, the nation’s debt — including both long-term and short-term figures — totaled NT$6.725 trillion at the end of last year, -ministry statistics show.

This is not a really serious debt situation. Does it really call for a sell-off of state assets -- a permanent transfer for a temporary gain? Of course not. And then there is the fairness issue -- the wealthy go untaxed, and much of this public debt was run-up to fund infrastructure projects that were essentially pay-offs to local patronage networks by the ruling party. Finally, if these public assets are sold off, we all know who they will be sold to.

One issue that occurs repeatedly throughout the last couple of decades is the government's poor management of its assets. Consider this 2002 piece:

According to Ministry of Finance estimates, the government currently owns securities with a market value of more than US$25.71 billion and US$57.14 billion worth of real estate. If other movable assets and equipment are tallied in, the total value amounts to more than US$171.43 billion. This figure would be even higher if assets at state-run enterprises were included. Despite the value of these assets, only US$1.04 billion in revenue was generated for the national coffers in 2001.

It is worth noting that the article states sales of state lands to cover losses were already policy at state-run businesses until the first Chen Administration when that was stopped. People who claim that Chen Shui-bian did nothing themselves know nothing.

Moreover, the government's poor return on its assets hides other issues. Like wastage -- when Agency A owns no land it pays rent, while at Agency B there is plenty of unused office space.

Would selling off assets pay "the debt"? Sure, until some future government ramped the debt back up. What's the value of all that land?  MoFA has the numbers on its website.... from what I can tell, the total value of public land is NT$4,832,701,000,000, or roughly US$161 billion (USD=NT30). Yeah, that might pay the debt... but a modest 5% return on land assets alone would be $8 billion annually. Clearly selling off  is the least effective policy in the long run, a transfer of assets that would merely make wealthy private asset holders even wealthier.

Sure hope to see the DPP was out there complaining about this and pimping the comprehensive land use policy and land law revisions it had wanted to carry out during the Chen Administration, instead of wasting everyone's time calling for impeachment of the President. This is exactly the sort of issue the Party should be out there leading the public.
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Daily Links:

• Brookings on Taiwan's Maturing Democracy (video)
• Kuokuang may be revived in Malaysia. Good riddance.
• Tracking Taiwan's national treasures, its butterflies.
• China, Japan, and South Korea to form free trade bloc. Taiwan feels the threat....

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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.

Harvesting the Periphery

Readers will recall that at the end of 2010 Taiwan created new municipalities in Kaohsiung, Tainan, and Taichung in which the metropolitan areas swallowed the counties that surrounded them.

This took place because those counties were being shorted in the perennial struggle for flows of development money from the central government, which lavishes funds on Taipei city.

An additional factor here is that local governments are deeply in debt. Probably because their administration is a mess, the big municipal governments would say.

A couple of weeks ago we got a bill for over NT$1288 for water and garbage collection. This was done by the address: every house in our neighborhood -- us with 4 people, neighbors with 11, old lady up the street who lives alone -- got billed exactly the same amount. The bill was sent to everyone in the new Taichung municipality who used to live in what had been Taichung county but which had been annexed. There was naturally no vote held on whether or not we would be annexed to Taichung city -- in that respect it is rather like the KMT's attitude toward Taiwan and China.

The bill was for water and garbage collection for the previous year. Everyone who was using underground water, like us, from a private water source, had to pay even though we have been faithfully paying our private water supplier. Yes, that's right, we are paying twice for the water and no, it makes no sense whatsoever since we now have to pay for water we never received. But I can be content knowing that big manufacturers have subsidized water and they are making plenty of money and that's really what's important, right?

For those on government water, if you used the government water company's water, you had to present proof with the bill that you had paid by attaching the previous year's bills. This was despite the fact that all the clerk had to do was scan the bill against your address to see whether you had paid. The purpose of requiring extra paper gives every appearance of being to extract extra money from people who had lost/trashed their receipts, or were too lazy to find them. Fortunately my obsessive wife keeps all our stuff going back seven years against just this sort of bureaucratic extortion.

Meanwhile, the city government has stopped paying subsidies to many low income families since the merger because, it claims, it is still combining the systems and can't find them. How much do you want to bet they all got water bills?
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Daily Links:

• What? High aluminum levels found in food? Say it ain't so! Let's hope the beef nonsense leads to renewed interest in having decent food in Taiwan. 
• Jimmy Lai to sell Taiwan media operations
• CNA says low salaries cause Taiwan's brain drain
• Excellent triparte interview with Su Beng, the longtime Taiwan independence and democracy activist, now translated. 
• 73 Taiwanese swept up in online fraud bust in Malaysia
• NOT TAIWAN: I've always been fascinated by the allure of Cryptozooids

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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.

Taiwan: Greece to Come?

Having fun in a pause between rainfalls. This is a crop; the original is here. I love capturing reflections in water bubbles...

After the election I argued in the Taipei Times that one of the hidden factors in the election of President Ma was the growing wealth divide in Taiwan....

During the 1990s, when then-president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) was midwifing the birth of Taiwan’s democracy, he essentially made a grand bargain. In return for their silence in his struggle to fend off the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) regressive right wing and its last-ditch defense of the party-state, it was decided that those who had grown wealthy by suckling off the party-state teat would not have their wealth taxed away through a progressive tax system, particularly a tax on Taiwan’s most important investment, land. Subsequent administrations have also found it politic to keep this bargain.

.....

Such individuals might have concluded that, if Tsai had won Saturday’s election, there would have been a significant reduction in their wealth if a fairer tax system were implemented, especially the paper wealth generated by the Taipei property bubble. Since Ma can be trusted to make noise about fairness, but to do little concrete, he was their obvious choice.

The property bubble is doing more than distorting the economy; it is distorting the nation’s politics as well. Observers have often remarked on Taiwan’s unfinished transition to democracy, yet they have seldom overtly argued that a critical factor in this is the regressive tax system.

As social inequality continues to grow, expect this wealthy class and its class interests to be a silent, but powerful driver of KMT success.

A similar political deal helped impoverish Greece, Spain, and Portugal, while in the US, the transfer of the nation's wealth out of the hands of its producers and into the pockets of a tiny coterie of fantastically rich individuals is having the same negative effect on the public purse, the ability of the nation to invest in its future, and on its democracy.

Surprisingly, the pro-KMT China Times came out with an interesting piece this week on the untaxed wealthy in Taiwan and their distorting effect on the nation's finances.

台灣稅賦公平嗎？一般民眾薪資所得每分錢都得乖乖繳稅，支撐了整個台灣主要綜所稅的來源，但炒房、炒股族卻可享有龐大「租稅優惠」，這部分「遺漏」的資本利得稅，估計每年大概在一千一百到一千五百億之間。

Is Taiwan's tax system fair? Every penny of the general public's wages are obediently taxed to support the whole of Taiwan's main resource of comprehensive income tax, while families with real estate and stocks enjoy huge tax incentives. The capital gains tax on this part of the "missing" taxes has an estimated value of NT$1.1 trillion to $1.5 trillion.

After the article details some of the taxes that have gone missing and their effects, it notes....

換句話說，不動產炒作者與股巿炒手至少年享逾千億元的「租稅優惠」！台北大學財政系教授蘇建榮就指出，依據國際貨幣基金會（IMF）提供資料顯示，當前台灣財政問題核心在於長期的「結構性財政赤字」，形成的原因除了政府支出結構外，主要是「長期的減稅制度」所造成。

In other words, real estate and stock market speculators enjoy tax breaks worth at least NT$1 trillion! Su Jianrong of the National Taipei University Department of Finance pointed out that International Money Fund (IMF) data show that the core of Taiwan's financial problems is the long-term structural deficit. In addition to the expenditure structure of the government, the main reason for the formation of the long-term structural deficit is long-term tax reduction.

...concluding:

長期的減稅制度不僅造成政府財政虛弱，入不敷出，更重要的是政府許多重要的政務，包括提高社會福利、補助弱勢民眾、加強教育投資等，都沒有能力再作擴充。最後必然造成國家與民眾受害。

This long-term tax system not only causes weak government finances, meaning that the nation is living beyond its means, but many important agendas of the government, including improving social welfare, subsidies to vulnerable populations, and increasing investment in education, cannot be expanded. In the end, it will inevitably lead to the victimization of both the nation and its people.

As long as the the government remains KMT, it is highly unlikely this will be fixed. This is a far more ominous issue with far greater ramifications for the future than the level of ractopamine in US beef -- which points to one of the important functions of the constant churning of minor issues like beef: it keeps the public nicely distracted...

UPDATED: Summary of interview this week of Control Yuan President Wang Chien-hsien, who said the government should impose taxes on stocks and real estate. Wang was forced to step down in 1992 when he attempted to levy a tax on real estate transaction based on the market price.

During an interview with the Taipei-based China Times, Control Yuan President Wang Chien-hsien (王建煊) indicted that in order to seek tax fairness and justice, the government should levy a capital gains tax on stock and real estate sales. In particular, he noted, the land value increment tax should be levied “based on market prices” on high-value real estate transactions as well as transactions of non-self-use residences. He went on to say that this would not require any Constitutional amendment, and the government would face less difficulty compared with imposing a new tax on securities exchange gains, so a capital gains tax on real-estate sales should be taken into consideration first. The increase in revenues from this tax could be used to subsidize first-time housing buyers, he noted.

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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.

The 18% Solution (to electoral difficulties)

Apple Daily ran an article today on a very interesting decision by the Administration.....I loved the poetry of Google's translation of the opening paragraph so much, I decided to keep it:

銓敘部去年十一月二十二日發函給退休公務員，告知即起調整百分之十八優存利率額度，引起「回存潮」，搶著到銀行補齊十八趴優存利率的存款額度。銓敘部退撫 司長呂明泰昨說，過去制度「肥大官、瘦小吏」，去年修法後對基層公務員較公平，整體而言，國庫每年節省約一億元支出。但民眾批：「公教人員退休躺在家靠十 八趴的利息，就賺得比很多勞工還多，這是哪門子公平？」

Ministry of Civil Service on November 22 last year [MT -- this may be a misprint, Liberty Times the following day has published a copy of a letter dated Dec 22], sent a letter to retired civil servants, this is to adjust the amount of eighteen percent gifted deposit interest rates, rise to "restore the tide ", rushing to the bank filled gifted deposit interest rates lying eighth Deposit amount. Ministry of Civil Service Pension Secretary Lvming Tai yesterday said that the past system, "Mast officer, thin officials"last year, after amending the law more equitable for grassroots civil servants, on the whole, the state treasury an annual saving of about one hundred million yuan expenditure. But the public's approval: "Catholic retirement home by the eighth lie lie interest to many workers earning more than than, this is sort of a kip fair?"

What is says is that on Nov 22 of last year the Civil Service Board sent around a letter to all retirees on gov't retirement getting the 18% interest, telling them that the 18% interest that retirees receive as a result of an administrative decision made forty years ago will be adjusted upward for a great many of them. During the Chen Administration many of these benefits had been rescinded, which is one reason the bureaucracy hated the Chen Administration so much. As the article notes further down, of the 60,000 retired civil servants receiving the 18% interest, 15,000 higher ranking ones will receive a downward adjustment, while 45,000 will receive an upward adjustment. The net savings, claims the government, will be $100 million annually.

Some retirees received notification well in advance of the Nov 22 letter, getting notified in September. Note that the Nov 22 letter would have arrived the week of the election on Nov 27. The focus on the Sean Lien shooting is obscuring many other issues. [MT -- the letter Nov 22 date may be an Apple Daily error]

The 18% interest is one of the many payouts that are pushing the counties deeply into debt, since half of that interest is paid by the central bank and half by the local governments.

As one of the individuals quoted in the Apple Daily piece commented, "一定是選舉到了又在政策買票!" "As the election nears the policy is to buy votes!". It's hard not to see this as vote buying -- the majority of the higher level retirees are KMT supporters and party members, since they entered the system in the days when only KMT members could rise in the bureaucracy. Meanwhile 45,000 lower level civil servants all get a boost of 3-4K from the gov't treasury, nearly 50K annually for many retirees.

Hard to see where all the money for the new municipalities and other commitments of the Ma government is going to come from....
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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.

New Municipalities, Old Problems

The new municipalities of Xinbei, Tainan, Taichung, and Kaohsiung opened for business today. One result was that the DPP made historic gains at the city council level, continuing its long-term erosion of the KMT presence in the local governments:

While local council heads are traditionally dominated by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and independent councilors, the DPP, for the first time in the nation’s history, took both the speaker and deputy speaker seats in the Greater Tainan City Council, as well as deputy speaker seats in the Taipei and Greater Kaohsiung City Councils.

In Taipei City, the incumbent council speaker, Wu Bi-chu (吳碧珠), of the KMT garnered 37 seats and won the seat for the fourth time, while her DPP rival Lee Chien-chang (李建昌) received 32 votes.

However, DPP councilor Chou Po-ya (周柏雅) defeated the incumbent deputy speaker Chen Chin-hsiang (陳錦祥) by a 30 to 29 margin, making him the first-ever DPP member to serve as deputy speaker of Taipei City Council.

The KMT accounted for 30 of all 62 Taipei City councilors, while the DPP garnered 23 seats. There are eight councilors from the New Party, People First Party and Taiwan Solidarity Union, and one independent councilor.

In the Taipei City election the KMT managed to unite behind the speaker, but split for the vice-speaker election due to the usual situation of one politician angry at another, with the PFP switching sides. Still, it is progress.

The North-South income disparity is an important driver of the island's political life; but now emerging is a growing clash between the municipalities and the counties. For years, Taipei and Kaohsiung commanded a huge chunk of government money, with Taipei getting the majority of that. To counter Taipei's massive advantages, Taipei County, Kaohsiung and its county, Taichung and its county, and Tainan and its county have decided to upgrade to municipality status in order to collect a bigger share of the government budget. Recall that in the ROC system a municipality is the equivalent of a province whereas the counties remain merely local administrations. The result is a worsening of urban-rural budget issues:

Under the tabled revision, special municipalities are set to receive 61 percent of the money set aside by the central government, up from 43 percent and roughly proportionate with their share of the population.

At the same time, the share given to counties and local municipalities will fall to 24 percent from 39 percent — a figure that the county commissioners yesterday want revised upward.

I wondered how income would be redistributed, but as in every country, income flows uphill toward power. The law revisions call for the municipalities to get 61 percent of the central government flows -- they used to get only 43%. I wondered how the government would handle the problem of all the new municipalities demanding new budget resources, and the answer is now clear: pillage the counties even more. The article referenced above opened with this emotional appeal:

Yunlin County is close to being unable to pay either the salaries or year-end bonuses of its 100,000 public servants.

Yilan County has a NT$20 billion (US$669.8 million) debt that is not getting any smaller, while Chiayi County has a NT$3 billion deficit it has not been able to reduce this year.

A month ago a commentary in the Taipei Times discussed the problems of local government debt in Taiwan, both public and "hidden":

Last year’s audit report revealed that up until the end of last year, of the eight cities and counties that will make up the soon-to-be five special municipalities, Taipei City had the highest overall debt at NT$291.7 billion (US$9.58 billion), followed by Kaohsiung City at NT$211.2 billion, Taipei County at NT$108.1 billion, Taichung County at NT$48.5 billion, Tainan County at NT$44.5 billion, Tainan City at NT$31.7 billion and Kaohsiung County at NT$26.4 billion. Taichung City had the lowest overall debt at NT$7.2 billion.

Similarly:

A 2009 audit report showed that until the end of last year, the eight cities and counties set to make up the country's five new special municipalities from Dec. 25 had an estimated US$26.6 billion of debt, including money owed to national health and labor insurance programs, pension contributions and interest payments for the pension schemes of civil servants.

Taipei City had the highest overall debt at about US$9.9 billion, followed by Kaohsiung City with around US$6.6 billion.

Taichung City had the lowest overall debt of US$238 million, but its debt is set to increase to US$1.7 billion after its merges with Taichung County to form a special municipality on Dec. 25.

Debt is a critical driver of political history. The new municipalities now redefine the north-south tension as a municipal-county tension. The Taipei Times had a page on the sputtering nonsense of the mayors of Taipei city, Taipei County, Taichung, and Tainan:

• New Cities, New Paths: Hau Lung-bin pledges to rejuvenate capital city
• New Cities, New Paths: Eric Chu heralds a ‘new age’ for ‘new’ city
• New Cities, New Paths: Greater Taichung’s Hu calls for ‘new concepts’
• New Cities, New Paths: Lai pledges to restore Tainan’s glory
  

Amidst all these backward-looking, faintly fascist calls for restorations of glory and new ages, one headline caught my eye:

New Cities, New Paths: Chen focuses on rural-urban gap

Stressing that all resources would be equally shared and fairly distributed, she also pledged to reduce the gap between rural and urban areas.

“I pledge there will absolutely be no such thing as a so-called ‘one city, two systems,’” she said.

She also called on the central government to attach more importance to the voices of southern Taiwanese.

Awesome.
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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.

Visiting the sins of the father on the children: inherited debt

The recent news on inherited debt shows a very classic Taiwan problem -- a bad situation is identified, the law is "reformed", but the problem remains. The Taipei Times writes today:

Despite amendments to the Civil Code last year to prevent children from inheriting debt, the Taiwan Fund for Families and Children (TFCF) found that more than 90 percent of children born into debt continued to suffer.

“We had hoped that children would be spared the burden of inherited debt from deceased family members when the limited inheritance clause was added to the Civil Code on Jan. 4 last year,” TFCF executive director Miguel Wang (王明仁) told a news conference in Taipei yesterday. “A year has passed and sadly most children born into debt are still suffering from it.”

The amendment stipulates that an inheritor may apply for a waiver within three months of a family member’s death if the deceased had more debt than assets. He or she can also only pay off a debt equivalent to the inherited assets.

In 2007 the TFCF had predicted the laws, revised late in 2007, did not go far enough:

More than 70 percent of people would still be living with inherited debt even if a proposed amendment to the Civil Code is passed, members of Taiwan Fund for Children and Families (TFCF) said during a press conference in Taipei yesterday.

According to an amendment to the Civil Code that passed its first reading at the legislature last week, people under the age of 20 will be automatically entitled to "limited debt inheritance" -- meaning that they would only have to repay any debts they have inherited by using the assets they have inherited, not from their own pocket.

The proposed amendment to the code also applies for three years retroactively.

The Civil Code allows "limited debt inheritance," but only if the person inheriting the debt makes a request within three months of the benefactor's death.

"However, most people are ignorant of the law and they only find out they are in debt when they are pursued by creditors," TFCF social works division director Chou Hui-hsiang (周慧香) told the news conference.

A survey of more than 1,700 households by the organization showed that 24.6 percent of children under 18 are more than NT$500,000 in debt and almost 80 percent of those indebted children are currently attending junior high school or younger.

The revisions, passed in Dec of 2007, permitted limited relief, but were not made retroactive for persons whose family members had served as guarantors of debt. In an extreme case profiled in the article above, a Tsinghua student discovered in 2007 that he was liable for a debt contracted by his uncle in 1976, now worth over $50 million NT on 30 years of interest, because his father had stood as guarantor. Taiwan Review discussed the changes:

Previously, the Civil Code stipulated that an heir must assume all rights and obligations pertaining to the property of the deceased. Activist groups and legislators claim it is unfair for people to be responsible for a debt that they did not incur, resulting in the creation of social injustice. The problem is that if heirs were not notified of the death, or did not know they had to take certain legal actions to waive the debts, they would be unwittingly responsible. This usually happens to economically disadvantaged women and their children, Legislator Huang Sue-ying pointed out in a Nov. 7 news conference, calling attention to this issue. Lin Lu-hong, the president of Taiwan Women's Link quoted an example of a 6-year-old boy sued by a bank that lent about US$10,000 to his recently deceased mother. Research conducted by the TFCF in November this year showed that one in five economically disadvantaged families have fallen victim to inherited debts.

Another beneficial amendment stipulates that if one had been guarantor of others' debts, his or her heir only has to satisfy creditors to the value of the property acquired in the inheritance. According to the previous Civil Code, if a parent acted as the guarantor of a friend's debt, but the friend fled abroad to avoid repayment, the child would bear full responsibility. However, the new amendments do not apply if the debtor evades the debt while the guarantor is still alive.

Despite all the reforms, crushing debt remains. An underreported issue is the connivance of banks: a few years ago the mother of a student of mine stole her ID and chop and went to five different banks and contracted for five credit cards, which she promptly maxed out, leaving her daughter deeply in debt. Hard to imagine how this woman, obviously much older than the ID, was permitted to contract for debt in her daughter's name, without the active cooperation of bank officials. In this case, the banks fought even these milquetoast revisions.....

[Taiwan]

Waiting for MaDough

As the Taipei Times reported this morning, today is the big day for distribution of vouchers for the vote buying program voucher program (slogan: Enjoying tomorrow's debt -- today!). The Taipei Times noted:

A total of 14,202 voucher distribution stations will be open across the country from 8am through 5pm to serve Taiwanese nationals.

They will also house 485 special counters to serve foreign spouses and residents around the country.

In our town the distribution station for the foreigners was at the local junior high, so my wife and I hopped on the family scooter and headed over to scoop up my share of the government's borrowings.

Despite the long lines (two hours for my wife and daughter!), we got ours because foreigners had their own special table. The friendly foreign police officer there knew me right away, and the whole thing was over in two minutes. An oddity of the rules was that foreign children could not receive vouchers. Hence, my dual citizen daughter, here on her Taiwan passport, got a voucher, but my equally dual citizen son, here on his US passport, could not.

Taiwanese line up for their vouchers.

Vouchers wait for their owners.

My wife models the dough.

Afterwards we went to the local lunchbox place, crammed with customers exchanging vouchers for food, while outside the market resounded with cries of bu zao ling! (we don't give change! [for the vouchers]).

[Taiwan]