Deportations from Kenya to China: you're asking the wrong question

Longtime and well known expat Donovan Smith, who is part of the Compass Magazine team and is also the ICRT central Taiwan news man, enjoys the 149A below Caoling. 

LOL. Concerns were raised among Taiwan observers when eight Taiwanese acquitted of fraud in a trial in Kenya were handed over to Chinese authorities this week. In 2011 Philippines sent a group of fraudsters off to China. It took months of negotiation to get them back.

Most of the discussion has focused on the sovereignty issue, and warning that this is ZOMG A BIG DEAL with REPERCUSSIONS for the incoming Administration. But note how the outline of the two cases, Philippines and Kenya, are the same: a mixed group of Chinese and Taiwanese accused of fraud, and Beijing gets the Taiwanese deported back to China.

Taiwanese are regularly involved in crimes abroad, but deportations back to China are rare. In fact, one never hears that China has asked for Taiwanese criminals to be returned to it rather than Taiwan. People asking about the effect this kidnapping on Taiwan's place in the world or sovereignty or cross-strait relations are asking the wrong question, probably because they are permanently trapped in the media matrix where everything Taiwan is related to China by refracting it through the lens of cross-strait politics, and no other meanings are possible.

I love Kenya but honesty compels me to admit that Kenya is a major transit state for money laundering, drugs, and other illicit activities. It is the "single easiest place in the world" to carry out illicit financial activities, in fact. I suspect that those Taiwanese were deported back to China because they knew something about illicit activities of China in Kenya, and Beijing wanted to have a little chat with them before they were handed back to Taiwanese authorities.

UPDATE: Another 37 forced on plane to China, bringing total to 45. If this is a sovereignty thing aimed at Tsai Ing-wen or Ma Ying-jeou, why do they need them all? Completeness is only necessary if you want to make a clean sweep of something. Like if you want to make sure of how much a group of people knows about something...  Also it's fan-feces time, as some news media reporting that at least one abductee has a US passport.
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Daily Links:

• CNN Travel piece on Mazu festival. Everything wrong: Doesn't mention the gangster links of the modern Matsu procession. Doesn't mention its political function. There is no mountainous or rugged terrain involved. The Chaotien Temple in Beigang is nowhere near Taichung city, but is about 90 kms south of it. LOL. So many competent travel writers on this island, why not choose one of them?
• BBC produces an entire article on the passport stickers from the China government point of view, never mentions why Taiwanese might want them.
• Export decline to continue
• Stratfor on 17C Dutch-China similarity. Writer is clueless about both, but there are some tables on Chinese investments overseas.
• The spy case; Taiwan-born US naval officer accused of spying. Typical set up with honey pot and everything.
• KMT making push in south.
• Taiwan's super gun ready to fight China. Yeah, it will fire about three rounds before it is killed.
• Satirical Facebook Hualien independence page is darling of PRC netizens and media
• Taiwan's air defense problems among the most difficult in the world.
• Popularity of Taipei Mayor Ko falling...
• Biopharma in Taiwan

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Truku aboriginals shut down Mugumuyu over excessive tourism, police vow to prosecute

Vans pouring out of Mugumuyu.

UPDATE: Don't miss the comments below.

Mugumuyu is a stunning and rich river gorge southwest of Hualien city, just west of Liyu Lake. Last month I biked into Mugumuyu to enjoy its beauty, but got rained out. Nevertheless, I noted the number of small buses and vans flowing in and out, an appalling number of visitors, when supposedly the number was controlled. So I was dismayed, but unsurprised, to hear that the local aboriginal community had finally taken matters into its own hands and shut the road into their community down, to block the endless flow of vans in and out. TT observes:

Prior to blocking the road, the residents performed a ritual at a monument erected in remembrance of 39 villagers who were buried by mudslides triggered by Typhoon Ofelia in 1990 by firing gunshots into the air and sending up smoke signals, declaring to their ancestral spirits their determination to defend their traditional territory.

“It’s not that we do not welcome visitors, but since our village has been opened to outside visitors in 2006, there have been on average more than 100 minibuses bringing in about 3,000 visitors per day on holidays,” village council chairman Masaw said.

“The large number of vehicles has polluted the air, creates traffic jams on the roads and makes it difficult for us to go to work in the fields,” he added.

Rakaw Didi, a spokesman for the village, which is administratively known as Tongmen Village (銅門), said that to maintain the village’s ecology and quality of life, the village council passed resolutions at the end of last month to close off the village for a year and to ask future visitors to enter into the village on foot, not in cars.

Now the local news is reporting that the police plan to prosecute the aborigines. Of course.
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Next Media: One of Many =UPDATED+

Some people argue that Taiwan is being "Finlandized" but that view is incorrect. What is actually happening is that Taiwan is being Hongkongized. Commonwealth Magazine observes in another one of its excellent articles Will Taiwan go the way of Hong Kong?:

Former Legislative Councilor and human rights activist Christine Loh wrote in her book Underground Front: The Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong that the vast majority of new owners of Hong Kong media are tycoons with vital business interests in China. These tycoons do not even shy away from buying loss-making Hong Kong media against common sense and entrepreneurial principles. Loh cites as an example Taiwanese billionaire Tsai Eng-meng, chairman and CEO of Want Want China Holdings, who bought a 47.58-percent stake in troubled Asia Television in 2009.

Like Hong Kong, Taiwan is being strategically flooded with Chinese tourists:

The southern city of Kaohsiung, long ruled by the DPP, is a prime target for Chinese efforts to win the hearts and minds of the locals with tangible economic benefits. Chinese nationals account for 60 percent of the harbor city's international tourists, a ratio two times higher than the nationwide average of 30 percent.

These tourists, as I have noted before, create new dependencies, and can be withdrawn if need be to punish southern Taiwan, as they were in 2009 when the Dalai Lama visited Taiwan. Southern Taiwan, long an exploited colonial region of the north and consequently powerfully pro-independence, is an important area of Chinese action. According to the article, Beijing's strategy is aimed at winning the three middles: middle (and lower) incomes, small and medium enterprises, and middle Taiwan. But a key component is a below the radar struggle over the media:

China-based Taiwanese entrepreneurs have also been exhibiting a growing appetite for unprofitable Taiwanese media outlets. In 2007 Eric Teng, who is chairman of Singfor Life Insurance and has strong business interests in Shanghai, joined hands with like-minded entrepreneurs to buy the staunchly anti-communist Central Daily News, the official party newspaper of Taiwan's Kuomintang (KMT). The print newspaper was then revamped as an online publication. According to its mission statement, Central Daily News is now devoted to cross-strait peace.

Moreover, the Kaohsiung-based Commons Daily, once reputed to be the largest newspaper in southern Taiwan, is about to be taken over by Global Life Insurance chairman Yeh Chia-ying, who has long maintained cozy ties with Kuo Hua Life Insurance's Ong clan and the Chin Pao San Group of Hong Kong. Another popular newspaper in the south, the Chinese-language Taiwan Times, has repeatedly been the target of takeover attempts.

ECFA, modeled after the Hong Kong CEPA agreement, is one of three prongs of Beijing's Hong Kong strategy for winning hearts and minds: (1) privileged economic access to Chinese markets; (2) floods of Chinese tourists; and (3) control of the local media in the hands of pro-Bejing billionaires. The article argues that Taiwan's more developed networks of civic organizations and its more entrenched democracy will enable Taiwan to prevent Hongkongization, but I would argue that Beijing's strategy, though strategically apt, is a tactical failure on all fronts because it exists merely for appearances' sake. ECFA is a sham that has done little for Taiwan's agriculture while encouraging smuggling from China; the profits from the China tourist trade are far less than the Commonwealth article claims and remain largely in the hands of the Chinese firms running the trade, and a pro-Taiwan media alternative still exists. Of course, Beijing could wake up at any moment.....

UPDATE: The International Federation of Journalists is also concerned about the implications of the NextMedia purchase for press freedom in Taiwan.
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Daily Links:

• More than 600 academics sign petition against the sick Miramar Resort in Taitung. Judge halts construction. To no avail as it continues....
• Pension reform on the way. 
• DPP Chairman Su to head up DPP's China committee
• Ma's pressing on Senkaku Islands sovereigny claim could hurt ties with the US. No kidding, that is one of the goals of his policy.

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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.