Universities Severely pinched... + Links

The KMT news organ reported....

According to statistics released Thursday by the Ministry of Education (MOE), in terms of registration rates for undergraduate programs, 17 universities across the nation saw less than a 60 percent enrollment rate, among which Nan Jeon University of Science and Technology (南榮科技大學) was the worst, with an 18.74 percent enrollment rate. Moreover, several universities and colleges in Taiwan failed to enroll any student in some of their doctoral programs for the 2016-2017 academic year.

.........

The statistics also showed zero enrollments in 151 departments and graduate programs at universities and technical and vocational colleges, most of which were master and doctoral programs, including 64 public and 87 private institutions. Among them, National Taiwan University (NTU), the top university in Taiwan, had the most doctoral programs with zero enrollments, including theater and drama, anthropology, sociology, social work, ecology, art history, evolutionary biology and translational medicine.

According to the Taipei Times, 60 universities are slated to be closed, meaning that 12,000 instructors will be out of a job, out of 48,000 in the system.

The massive subsidies of the Lee and Chen Administration to universities had two effects. First, they encouraged the vocational schools to "upgrade" to universities, destroying the vocational universities, an incredibly useful source entrepreneurs, and they encouraged proliferation of universities. Many construction companies opened universities to farm the subsidy system -- if a university reached a certain minimum number of students and certain facility minimums such as a library with X number of volumes and a running track, then it received subsidies. The university would contract with the construction company to build its buildings, providing a flow of money... Over a decade ago the government started to mandate expansion of PhD programs throughout Taiwan -- the university I was at in central Taiwan received orders to accept 20 PhD students even though we did not have the professors to teach them.Then came the rotating subsidy...

As this year marks the end of the “Race to the Top Universities” program, which saw the government issue NT$50 billion (US$1.55 billion) in subsidies to a dozen select universities since 2011, a group of doctors hired for the program could be the first to lose their jobs, Taiwan Higher Education Union secretary-general Chen Cheng-liang (陳政亮) said.

This was rotated around many universities, leading to the hiring of faculty to teach contract classes. More hiring, more expansion. All this is ended....

The smell of desperation is thick in the air: already there is a huge pool of part-timers whom universities are using to source classes, just as in the US. They will work for crappy pay, worse than a cram school, and universities will increasingly turn to them. With the job market shriveling and universities dying, grad students are going overseas or entering programs in materials, engineering, electronics, and similar. Humanities are widely perceived as a swift road to unemployment... Taiwan overproduces PhDs as people pursue the status of having a PhD, and avoid the job market.
_____________________
Daily Links:

• Tsai stops in US. The international media is disgusting, saying China will be angry and hyping the China reaction...  and Reuters is breaking all records with disingenuous writing saying US says Taiwan is part of China. Like this one. Absolutely vile. 
• *sigh* The pro-KMT China Post is sourcing articles from the China Daily: Taiwan's glorious oolong. China's media reach will expand next year -- as many people have commented, it is hilarious to hear all the complaints about fake news while sites in the US host CCTV and other Chinese propaganda organs.
• Same sex marriage bill passes first screening
• Taiwan-India legislative forum
• Japan renamed its rep office... and China whined.
• China backing Okinawan Independence -- no surprise there...
• Tsai: Taiwan faces uncertain 2017. Won't cave to China threats
• What is US Taiwan Policy? from Russell Hsiao and David An
• KMT to destroy budget negotiations in legislature. What pathetic failures as a party in a democracy and as human beings dedicated to the future of Taiwan. 
• Foxconn to blow another $8.8 billion on China factory
• Taiwan's manufacturing center continues to recover
• Every year: US says no change in Taiwan policy
• GTI: Taiwan as Asia's Silicon Valley
• GTI: Prospects for US-Taiwan Economic Cooperation: TPP and Beyond
• GTI: Examining “Womenomics”: Comparing Women’s Impact and Experiences in the Workforce in Taiwan and Japan

_______________________
[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!

Fujen Dorm issue: Can we have IQ tests for DPP officials, please?

Old motorcycle, old house.

At Fujen University, the Catholic University outside of Taipei, the female students finally started a protest this week to put an end to the sexist and authoritarian practice of curfews for the female dorm. A group calling itself the FJU Cinderellas had staged the protest, which included one student going on a hunger strike -- nicely timed, since the end of the semester is only a couple of weeks away. The university agreed to stop the practice.

Regrettably, this urgent need to control female sexuality is not just a practice of the Catholic schools, but is widespread in Taiwan universities:

Ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Su Chiao-hui (蘇巧慧) cited a student survey as saying that 26 percent of universities and colleges in Taiwan have gender discrimination regulations in their dorm management, with Fu Jen being one of them.

The students highlighted an important issue that appeared to be missing in the legislative discussion:

Liao, a senior student studying public health, began the hunger strike May 30. She said one more person would join her for the strike each day until the school answered their calls, which include abolishing the curfew system for girls' dorms, installing electronic door control devices, and lifting a roll call at the beginning of the curfew.

Other demands are to clearly define the authority of the nuns and girls' dorm keepers, and holding elections to select students to be in charge of dorm affairs.

The student leader argued that the curfew is not just a problem of gender equality, but also affects the rights of dorm tenants, most of whom are from rural areas and financially disadvantaged, who cannot afford a privately rented room.

What she means is that people from money can afford to rent a room and come and go as they please. People from the working class must accept controls. Gender equity issues are frequently class issues as well.

Sadly, according to the Taipei Times, a DPP legislator urked up:

When asked by DPP Legislator Hsu Chih-chieh (許智傑) how he would respond to students if he were the dean of Fu Jen, Pan said that he would probably issue identification cards to female students, granting them unlimited access to their dormitories via a card reader, provided that the time at which the students leave and return to their dormitories is recorded and forwarded to their parents.

A longtime observer asked in an email discussion group a question that is already starting to occur to many minds: at what point will Tsai Ing-wen start being held accountable for the remarks of the slothful and regressive elements of the DPP, who are rolling along unchecked.
_______________________
[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!

Friday Night Lites

A night market in Wanhua.

Apologies for the light blogging, but the end of the semester here has been brutal. Waay overloaded with work.

Another reason I haven't blogged much is because I'm waiting for the release of the video of the Philippines Coast Guard vessel shooting at the Taiwanese fishing craft. There doesn't seem to be much more to say, since the Taiwan government hasn't moved off its ridiculously intransigent position, still taking the absurd position that Philippines should accept responsibility before the investigation terminates.... for example, from Ma Ying-jeou himself:

“This is the first incident which has taken place since the Taiwan-Philippine Agreement on Mutual Legal Assistance in Judicial Matters was concluded in April,” stated Ma, adding that if the case could be brought to an end with an impartial conclusion so as to render justice to the victim, the ROC government would lift the eleven sanctions leveled against the Philippines. By doing so, Ma stated, he believed that Taiwan-Philippine relations would become even stronger.

As I chuckled sourly before, for the Taiwan government, an "impartial" investigation is one in which Manila accepts fault. The KMT government takes essentially the same position in the brochure in the post below this one. Sad. This is also the position taken by Dennis Halpin two weeks ago in a very strange piece in The Diplomat which was basically an empty rehash of the KMT government line with some significant reshaping of events. As commenters below the piece noted, it was highly misleading. Consider this passage:

On May 11 the public outcry in Taiwan was already high. Understandably, Taipei was very concerned with Manila’s evasive attitude in handling this crisis. As the aggrieved party, Taipei urged Manila on May 11 to agree within seventy-two hours to conduct a joint investigation, in addition to asking for a formal apology. Taipei also requested Manila to start negotiations of a bilateral fishery agreement to prevent this kind of tragedy from happening again in the future.

During this seventy-two hour period from May 11 to May 14, there was only silence between Taipei and Manila. If, at this critical moment Manila had taken immediate, consistent and concrete steps to build mutual trust with Taipei, the standoff would have been largely resolved. Taipei needed to be reassured but, regrettably, Manila kept sending the wrong signals.

Haha. The "72 hour period" is actually the period when Taipei issued an ultimatum to Manila to kowtow or face sanctions. Note the verbs: "Taipei urged" and "Taipei also requested". Taipei neither urged nor requested. It set out threats and conditions. These two paragraphs are a total travesty in which the terms ultimatum and sanctions are omitted, completely misleading the reader as to the reality of the situation. Further down, finally, the term sanctions is introduced.

Yummmmm.....

Meanwhile, back at the farm, the KMT was protecting its real constituents, the 1%. Commonwealth Magazine had another excellent piece on Taiwan's doleful tax problems and its obedience to the stupidity of trickle down economics.

May 3 was a normal Friday, seemingly just like any other. But away from the glare of Taiwan's pervasive media, without any debate, conglomerates, Taiwanese businesses operating overseas and majority Kuomintang legislators teamed up to block an amendment to Taiwan's Income Tax Act that would prevent companies from avoiding taxes by booking and keeping their profits overseas.

The revision, which had already cleared its first reading in the Legislative Yuan (a bill has to clear three readings to become law), was removed from the body's agenda and sent for consultations between majority and minority lawmakers, to take place out of the public eye.

Read the whole article, it's excellent. This happened quietly, but the furor over the amendments to the Accounting Act has forced both President Ma and DPP Chairman Su Tseng-chang, to apologize for one of the more despicable moments in bipartisan screwing of the public by the two parties. Ben Goren has an excellent round-up:

Taipei Times cartoon critiquing the midnight Friday amendment of the Accounting Act (會計法) by the Legislative Yuan which appears to have been designed to exonerate and clear of wrong doing a large number of public servants, including currently jailed gangster politician and former independent legislator and Taichung County Council speaker Yen Ching-piao (顏清標). The DPP are divided on this as apparently some of their members aided the passage of the amendment without first getting consensus within the caucus.

According to the report, the DPP wanted the amendment to clear hundreds of professors facing possible indictment but the KMT wanted it to cover city councillors as well so they made a deal and pushed it through. In a blatant piece of convenient hypocrisy and double standards, the KMT surprised no one in refusing to also include decriminalizing the misuse presidential state funds, something that might have benefitted former President Chen. On hearing this news of law being made to retrospectively figuratively relocate people back across the line from criminality to innocence, Chen allegedly tried to hang himself in prison.

The Taipei Times put it succinctly today:

The amendment, passed at the last minute in closed-door cross-party negotiations on Friday last week before the legislature went into recess, was supposed to exempt research grants given by the government to professors and elected officials’ special allowances from being audited.

However, the word “teaching [faculty]” was missing from the amended act’s Article 99-1, which means professors may still face prosecution.

Meanwhile, convicted officials, such as former Non-Partisan Solidarity Union legislator Yen Ching-piao (顏清標), who has been in jail since Feb. 19 after he was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison for using nearly NT$20 million (US$668,500) in taxpayer money to visit hostess bars, will be released once the amendment is promulgated.

Yen Ching-piao, you may recall, runs his central Taiwan legislative district as his personal fief and is widely reputed to be one of the island's wealthiest and most powerful....er....well.

The Executive Yuan isn't going to veto the bill, says the article, because the error was typographical, according to the Premier, and because the preamble to the bill clearly says it includes professors. The bill exempts Special Funds, slush funds provided to most major political positions which appointees may basically use as they please. President Ma was indicted and tried for downloading them into his personal accounts, a fact which no one disputed. Ma's defense was that they were intended by the KMT government for just that purpose. Chen Shui-bian was tried for doing that as well and cleared in the original trial and on two appeals. Last I recall, another court had sent the charge back down for retrial.

If the bill doesn't include professors, well -- auditing pesky professors might become just the antidote to suing them. Let's hope the law is read as the Premier says.

As for our economy..... a few posts down I took a quick look at the "stimulus" the government is touting, a worthless number too low to have any effect. The KMT government undercut its "stimulus" by quietly asking all government departments to implement an across the board 8% cut in 2014 budgets. There is no stimulus.
_______________________
[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!

Student Protesters Push Back Against Ministry

Taichungers: been to the gourd shop outside of Dongshi on Rte 8 (somewhere in here)? Some lovely gourd art there.

NewTalk reported on National Tsinghua University's attempt to rein in its student protesters.

清大今天發出聲明，對於陳為廷昨天在立法院的不當行為「深感痛心」，也對蔣偉寧及社會大眾所造成的傷害致上最深的歉意。

National Tsing Hua University today issued a statement yesterday in the Legislative Yuan, saying that it was "deeply saddened" by the inappropriate behavior of [student leader] Chen Wei-ting and offering its deepest apologies for the harm caused to [Minister of Education] Jiang Weining and the community.

....

陳為廷稍早也在臉書發表聲明，澄清自己昨天是受立委之邀前去「備詢」，立委本來就有職權邀請公民到場提供意見，他不認為自己的言行有錯；他也強調，昨天的發言只是陳述個人意見，並沒有要質問、要求蔣偉寧回答的意思，很遺憾被外界錯誤解讀。

Earlier on Facebook Chen Wei-ting issued a statement to clarify [his words from yesterday at the Legislative Yuan,] .....he stressed that yesterday's speech was a statement of personal opinion, and was not intended to interrogate Minister Chiang and demand an answer. It is regrettable that it was misinterpreted by outsiders [he said].

Tsinghua University was responding to comments by Chen Wei-ting in a session of the legislature yesterday in which he and others criticized Minister of Education Chiang for the Ministry's email which asked universities to "care for" students protesting. To many ears it sounded like a coded authoritarian message. The Taipei Times reported on the legislative session in which Chen Wei-ting spoke:

While legislators across party lines asked Chiang to apologize for the e-mail, he repeatedly said the ministry would engage in “profound reflection.”

Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Ho Hsin-chun (何欣純) said the school regulations of 22 of the 37 universities included in the e-mail still included punishments for students who hold assemblies and protests, adding that the ministry should have showed concern by eliminating such rules.

DPP Legislator Tuan Yi-kang (段宜康) said that Chiang should at least apologize for the ministry’s inability to show real concern for students, even if he would not for its misguided wish to monitor them.

“We think the ministry’s words of concern are hypocritical,” said Lin Fei-fan (林飛帆), convener of the Youth Alliance Against Media Monsters and a National Taiwan University graduate student, adding that the minister could have approached the students when they were protesting in poor weather, or called the premier to tell him about the students’ demands.

“Minister, I think you are full of lies, a hypocrite and a minister that does not know repentance. I don’t think you are qualified to be a minister. Please apologize to us,” said another convener of the alliance, Chen Wei-ting (陳為廷), a student at National Tsing Hua University.

Many pixels have been launched along the intertubes about the generational change within the two major political parties, but in a sense this evolution reflects a tremendous social transition: the students in their twenties now grew up in the democratic era, while those who sit in judgment on them are relics of the authoritarian period, in many cases formally and informally vetted to ensure they had proper political views when they entered the system back in the 1980s. The two sides speak to each other out of completely different cultural worlds.

This generational clash is particularly profound at the universities, which are structured to prevent students from engaging in exactly this kind of political activity. The universities do not overtly pursue political students but the structures remain in place, latent. Workloads are heavy, students have limited choice. The nation's universities are famously paternalistic, an attitude that is always threatening to shade into outright authoritarianism, and almost alone among the major institutions of society they have failed to adopt the best practices from abroad (compare that to major Taiwanese firms). There is an almost visceral fear of student political activity; people like Chen Wei-ting and Lin Fei-fan must send shudders coursing up the System's backbone. Moreover, the students quoted in the last couple of days in the media come from sectors long known for pro-Taiwan and pro-democracy political activity: National Taiwan University, frequently described as very Green, and doctors.

Students in every society have a kind of moral force that other protesting groups are often perceived as lacking. Leaders fear this moral authority. In Taiwan student protesters have to contend with what they often describe as a wearisome partisan divide -- they struggle to keep their protests about issues of civil society and human rights that are neither Blue nor Green, to prevent their protests from becoming discredited as merely partisan action. It is to the credit of both sides' legislators, and to the students who struggled to straddle that divide, that legislators of both parties demanded an apology from the Ministry of Education for this apparent attempt to intimidate the protesters. Sadly, no forthright apology was issued....
_______________________
[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.

=UPDATE= Ministry of Education Launches White Terror Tactics Against Next Media Student Protesters?

This is flying around Facebook and the bulletin boards in Taiwan, hotter than hot right now. The email above is said to have been circulated by the Ministry of Education (MoE). The last sentence is ambiguous to me, but apparently it reads either that the MOE is looking for lists of registered students so it can see who was absent and presumably at the protests, or else it has attached a list of such students for the schools to handle. After noting that it has been raining and cold for several days, it asks that "...university officials care for the health of the students..." and "each university more deeply understand and care for the students". The subtext is obvious to anyone who grew up in Taiwan, especially during the martial law era. The students are engaged in their own subversive response, but this sort of thing is also aimed at the parents. That way the parents will put pressure on the students not to engage in such activities. That also happened during the Wild Strawberry protests about the Assembly and Parade Law a couple of years ago.

The email goes out to many universities all over Taiwan. It asks "區內學校" to spread the word. "區內" appears to be a reference to "Taiwan Region." Ugh.Nope, just a reference to the districts the universities are in.

If you read Chinese, there are some hilarious comments on this popular bulletin board system. The "689" appears to be a coded reference to the number of people (in millions, 6.89) who voted for Ma Ying-jeou as well as the 689 votes by which Leung Chun-ying won the Hong Kong chief executive election.

Expect updates as new information comes in.

UPDATE: Excellent Taipei Times report showing how the students understand "concern".

On the other hand, in the context of student movements, the term “concern” is often associated with threats and attempts by schools to bar students from taking part in demonstrations.

“For example, some universities would impose stricter curfews in student dorms because they are ‘concerned’ about students’ safety at night. CGU cuts the Internet connection at dorms at midnight because the school administration is ‘concerned’ that students may stay up all night playing online games,” Chang said. “Moreover, school officials or on-campus military education officers talk to students when student newspapers publish articles critical of school or government policies, saying they only want to show their ‘concern.’”

The term “showing concern” has always had a negative connotation among students, he said.

Great work, TT.
_______________________
[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.

Speech: A Chill in the Air

To see this in larger size, go here.

The free speech temperature in Taiwan plummeted this week with two events. First came the Hu's Girls episode, summarized by David on Formosa on his Posterous Blog:

Jason Hu is the current Mayor of Taichung and KMT candidate for Mayor of Greater Taichung in the forthcoming election. As part of his campaign his team produced a video featuring "Hu's girls" with twin sisters singing and dancing to promote Taichung. Then netizen "Kuso Cat" (廖小貓) produced a KUSO* version of the video. The KUSO version spliced in news reports about Taichung's sex industry. The twins then complained about the video. Links to both videos are below.

• The original Hu's girls video
• Kuso Cat's KUSO version of the Hu's girls video

David then links to this excellent article by Danny Bloom on the Hu's Girls mess, which was completed in fine Taiwan style with the girls giving a tearful press conference about how they had been abused. In Taiwanese media conferences, tears are an important and often artful signal of victimhood. Poor dears. Maddog rips into the reporting and the original video:

I don't completely agree with the Taipei Times' characterization that the video "portrayed the young women as working as hostesses at a nightclub in Taichung." An important bit of context that's missing from the related coverage is this this October 29, 2010 news story about police alerting the girls at a Taichung night club of an impending raid. The video of the girls sneaking around fits perfectly. In both the original video and the parody, Jason Hu calls these girls "Everybody's girls!" Although the vehicle for the parody is the video and the girls seen within, its real target is the public figure they're promoting: Jason Hu.

The girls' loud protestations of victimhood serve to divert attention from maddog's final point: the real target is Jason Hu, not the girls. As maddog notes: "When businesses like the Golden Jaguar (金錢豹) are still flourishing -- despite promises by Hu that he would clean Taichung up -- doesn't this kind of parody practically write itself?"

As this attempt to chill KUSO's excellent parody was going down, our friends at that center of enlightenment, the Ministry of Education, in fine martial law-era style, sent around the missive above to NT regarding its popular PPT bulletin board site. The Taipei Times has the call:

The one-page notice was sent last month to National Taiwan University, which oversees the PTT site frequented by hundreds of thousands of users daily.

Citing complaints received by Premier Wu Den-yih’s (吳敦義) office, the notice said political articles dominate the PTT’s Gossip Board and that it wished to see political staffers who try to “manipulate” Netizens’ opinions on the board removed from “an educational network” to give users a cleaner environment.

Gossip Board administrators should step up their management of Internet use and comments that “are not used for educational or research purposes,” the notice said.

The notice was posted on the Internet by one of the administrators of the forum, who claimed it was forwarded to her through school officials. Within hours hundreds of angry messages had been posted online on Internet forums and social networking Web sites.

Most of the comments voiced concerns about what they said was an attempt to assume control of, and regulate parts of the PTT, which include more than 1.5 million registered members and tens of thousands of discussion boards.

It is almost impossible to overestimate how important BBS systems are in the online lives of Taiwanese students; they are probably far more popular than blogs or the PHP-based discussion forums so popular overseas. The Ministry has struck at something every Taiwan student uses. The Taipei Times editorialized:

Shame on the ministry for issuing such a notice, which it described as a “mere friendly reminder,” because it instantly begs the question from any rights-conscious Internet users as to what authority the ministry thinks it has to restrict students from exercising their right to free speech online.

Accusing those taking part in the Gossip Board and chatting about politics of being subversive moles planted by political parties is ridiculous.

Many academics and adults have often lamented that young people nowadays are indifferent to what is happening around them, that they lack ideals and indulge their selfish desires in online gaming. So shouldn’t the ministry take it as an encouraging sign that there are college students who do pay attention to the serious matters happening around them and care enough to spend time discussing those issues online on the so-called Gossip Board?

The logic behind the ministry’s decision to send the notice is perplexing. Does it wish for the nation’s youth to not have their own opinions on serious subjects such as politics, wanting them only to comment on gossip like who actress Barbie Hsu (徐熙媛, better known as Big S) is engaged to or what designer’s dresses the movie stars are going to flaunt on the red carpet at the upcoming Golden Horse Awards?

I don't think the Ministry is actually thinking in terms of seizing control, but rather, is simply responding to this in the usual vicious, stodgy, and reactionary way that Taiwan's universities are run, more instinct than calculation, where the answer to all social "problems" is "more control".

The problem is what kind of signal will be read into this letter by university administrators -- whether it is seen in Taiwan's High Context culture as a signal for administrators to more tightly police their schools' individual bulletin boards. As an insightful friend of mine remarked, in that way the Ministry could achieve the effect of implementing authoritarian controls throughout campus BBS systems, without ever having such a stated policy.

Another friend pointed out that as a student remarked on television last night, for eight years the BBS systems at universities bashed Chen Shui-bian, and nothing happened. The when the focus switched to the KMT, the Ministry ultimately moved to send out signals that the debate should be quashed.

The timing is excellent, with just three weeks to go before the big local election too. That clumsy timing suggests again that this letter is knee-jerk.

The irony is that, as yet another insightful commenter noted, the Ministry could have sent around a missive discussing cyber-bullying and cyberstalking, which are a problem, or alerting the universities to the new cyber laws (see discussion below). Further, the Ministry could also have suggested a review of security and content management policies at universities without mentioning politics, especially in light of the new law. At my old university, legally actionable claims about teachers were posted anonymously to the campus bulletin board, and used as the subject of political attacks on teachers, but anyone could gain access to the system and there was no way to know who was posting.

Finally, Danny Bloom's article on the Hu's Girls Incident points out two chilling facts. First, the Taichung Prosecutors were asked to look into the parody. Definitely chilling, but fortunately the prosecutor's office did not pursue it. Second is the new law coming online next year that will result in a dramatic rise in lawsuits....

Come next year, when Taiwan's Data Protection Act will give way to Taiwan's age of online liability, strict new stipulations will put virtually everyone in Taiwan at risk of unknowingly breaching the Personal Data Protection Act, with possible fines of up to US $500,000.

In particular, cyberbullying and cyberstalking (and cyberflaming) will no longer go unpunished, and such things as posting an article or photo of someone else on the internet or in a personal blog will be considered,under the law, to be ''leaking'' personal data, if the person concerned has not given his or her approval.

For example, once the act is enforced, it won't be a good idea to post articles or photos of other people anywhere online without their express permission. If the content of articles or photos posted on the internet pertains to other persons, they must be notified and asked for prior approval, according to sources.

Given the provisions of the act, lawyers representing people who try to fight cyberbullying and cyberstalking will have have more artillery in their arsenals. Even flaming other people in forums and blogs will be subject to legal action. If those flamed wish to press charges they can go ahead, according to sources in the legal field.

The government won't have to censor cybermedia because the "victims" will be able to censor it themselves.

UPDATED: Several commentators have pointed to a similar move earlier this year: remember the Neutrality Act for Academics and its potential chilling effects?

ADDED: Okami below speculates:

I wonder how much the directive from the MOE has to do with Mainland Chinese students. I could see that being an unmentioned yet critical point of the memo. I expect it to get a lot chillier in Taiwan with regards to rights and govt regulations.

__________________
Daily Links

• Our coming uglier foreign policy, from John Feffer
• Rising Powers Initiative from GW: blog, website, conferences
• I've heard this claim semi-annually since I've been on this island: gov't to reclaim public housing in private hands. Yeah, right.
• Taiwan's machine-tool firms see year on year sales double
• China Daily: plans for China-Taiwan cross-strait bridge set for 2015.
• Asian Sentinel: oceans devastated by climate change, policymakers do diddly.
  

_______________________
[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.

Chen Yuan-tsong, Pompe disease, biotech, Whites playing Asians

Yes, everything in that title is in this post. First the Taipei Times today reported in an article on whether professors should be allowed to work in corporations as well as teach in universities:

The ministry made the announcement after Chen Yuan-tsong (陳垣崇), director of Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, was released on NT$600,000 bail on Tuesday after being questioned by prosecutors in a corruption investigation.

Chen is suspected of transferring his patented technologies for producing genetic-based diagnostic tests to Phamigene — a biomedical company in which he serves as honorary founder — that then sold two test products to Academia Sinica through two government procurement bids for a total value of NT$15 million (US$467,000).

Prosecutors said Chen’s wife is also a manager at the company.

Under the Government Procurement Act (政府採購法), procurement staff or supervisors must withdraw if they or their spouses, blood relatives or relatives by marriage who live with or share property with them, have vested interests in the a particular procurement.

Chen Yuan-tsong is already famous and in fact a movie is being made about him, except he is not being mentioned at all and his part is completely overwritten by Whitey -- in this case, Harrison Ford. Angry Asian Man has the call here:

But the real guy who developed the cure was not a Dr. Robert Stonehill, nor looks anything like Indiana Jones. The real guy is a fellow named Dr. Yuan-Tsong Chen, who developed the treatment with colleagues at the Duke University Medical Center. I learned this from, of all places, Roger Ebert's movie review:

Dr. Robert Stonehill doesn't exist in real life. The Pompe cure was developed by Dr. Yuan-Tsong Chen and his colleagues while he was at Duke University. He is now director of the Institute of Biomedical Science in Taiwan. Harrison Ford, as this film's executive producer, perhaps saw Stonehill as a plum role for himself; a rewrite was necessary because he couldn't very well play Dr. Chen. The real Chen, a Taiwan University graduate, worked his way up at Duke from a residency to professor and chief of medical genetics at the Duke University Medical Center. He has been mentioned as a Nobel candidate.

Ebert also speculates that Dr. Chen might have been inspired a more interesting character than Dr. Stonehill. But I suppose Harrison Ford, who also serves as the film's executive producer, isn't the first guy that comes to mind for the role of "Taiwanese Scientist." Thus, the rewrite. Ah, what could've been.

In addition to Pompe Disease, Chen has done other awesome work, which is why he's been mentioned in the same sentence with Nobel (Taipei Times with more on the film)(Danny Bloom with a discussion of the White-Asian issues). It totally sucks that Ford somehow couldn't find a talented Asian actor to play the role, though there are many.

Meanwhile, back to the indictment. Ask yourself if this brilliant scientist moved to Taiwan and suddenly became corrupt and venal. Think maybe not? I've heard on the background that he transferred the product to this firm because it appears to be the only one in Taiwan that can make the product. The real problem, as the government appears to have correctly diagnosed, in this case, is that the laws governing the relationships between universities and corporations hinder transfer of commercializable technology.
_________
Daily Links

• Kerim over at Savage Minds with some thoughts on universities in Taiwan
• CAP's Lilly on Taiwan and the US
• Our falling birthrate from the Taipei Times
  
• AFP reports tens of thousands at ECFA protest today in Taipei, as does Reuters.
  

_______________________
[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!

Properly Indoctrinated Chinese students to Arrive here

The Chinese State determines who studies in Taiwan, according to the China Reform Monitor:

Beginning in September, seventy-three private universities and vocational institutions in Taiwan will, for the first time, enroll students from mainland China. About 1,000 mainland students have already applied to study in Taiwan’s universities, which plan to recruit a total of 2,000 mainland students. Mainland students are eligible when their institution gives them a high political awareness certificate. The China Senior College Exhibition Organization Committee started processing the applications on April 1 and will finish at the end of May, the official China Daily reports.

Note that no national universities in Taiwan are included in this list -- 73 private and vocational universities -- mostly second tier colleges or worse. The KMT's logic is that Chinese students will make Taiwan's education system more "competitive." In local political discourse appeals to competitiveness by the KMT are now commonplace for all its programs, as if this closes all argument. In fact, I was fortunate to get a leaked transcript of the interrogation of the four police officers who were present at the shooting of a local gangster the other day in Taichung. Here it is for your reading pleasure:

INTERROGATOR: And the four of you were doing what with that gangster?
OFFICER 1: Playing Mah-jong. It makes us more competitive.
INTERROGATOR: More competitive! With who?
OFFICER 2: Other policemen sir, from other places in Taiwan and even in China. They all play mah-jong with gangsters too. Do you want us to lose all the time?
INTERROGATOR: I see. And the hitter came in, and told you all that this didn't concern you. His gun jammed for the first time. Did you do anything while he went outside to fix it?
OFFICER 3: No sir.
OFFICER 4: Non-action makes you more competitive. That is the essence of the Tao.
INTERROGATOR: What!
OFFICER 1: Sir, it is true! His gun jammed a second time and he stepped outside to fix it again. Can you not see the success of our non-action? It jammed his gun twice!
INTERROGATOR: Ok...Ok.... then he came in for the third time and shot the gangster. And you took a bullet in the leg, right?
OFFICER 2: Yes sir.
INTERROGATOR: What did you do then?
OFFICER 2: I quickly ran out the door, sir.
INTERROGATOR: You fled the scene.
OFFICER 2: Nossir, I ran with one leg wounded. This made me more competitive. Now I will surely win the 10,000 meter race in the next Police Games!*

Competitiveness has nothing to do with it -- the lower tier vocational schools are often run by local clans that have old connections to the KMT. Bringing in Chinese students is another status quo move that will preserve those schools, save them from elimination, essentially sending Chinese cash down KMT patronage networks. This makes the KMT more competitive.....

*Yes, according to news reports, that is exactly how it went down!
__________
Daily Links:

• Anthropologist Scott Simon with an interesting piece on indigenous rights in Taiwan
• Taiwan pulls eight films from China film festival over Taiwan, China fears
• Half Taiwanese becomes Japanese cabinet minister.
• Kids at elementary school taught to build own bikes (Chinese and English)
  單車、都蘭──我的夢
  http://www.dfun.com.tw/?p=9815
  都蘭山的單車夢，邀您一起參與！
  http://www.dfun.com.tw/?p=26977 單車、都蘭山─我的夢(第三期_2009立夏)
  http://garden91.pixnet.net/blog/post/28972951
• TOTALLY NOT TAIWAN: A very interesting article on Canada, the Northwest Passage, international sovereignty, and national identity.
  

_______________________
[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!

Falling Birth Rates to kill universities?

Taiwan's universities will shrivel in a few years if they don't have more warm bodies, Taiwan Today article from the China Times warns:

In 2008 there were 59,000 unfilled vacancies for first-year students. The Ministry of Education said the total will exceed 100,000 in 2021 if steps are not taken. The ministry has decided to reduce the total enrollment quota by 2 percent every year. Even so, with the influence of the baby bust, it is estimated that enrollment will still fall short by 71,000 students.

Kuomintang Legislator Huang Chih-hsiung pointed out that currently there are 164 colleges and universities (excluding military and police schools and National Open University). With people having fewer and fewer children, it is predicted about one third of all colleges, or 60 schools, will go out of business, leaving only 100 or so colleges in operation.

When supply of something vastly exceeds demand, look for the subsidy. The reason there are too many universities is because it is profitable for construction and other companies to open them, due to the generous subsidies. Now legislators are concerned that important cash cows in their districts may wilt -- hence the pressure by university administrators to permit Chinese students to come -- the China Cargo Cult, academic version. That gusher of warm bodies from across the Strait can save us!

The smart thing would be to shut down the lowest 80 or so universities, but that would lead to screaming from local legislators and from local PHDs, for whom the universities are little more than a jobs program (Taiwan churns out more than it needs, of course). In fact this year the government has quietly been handing out subsidies to local universities to take on more educated assistants -- our department hired a slew of masters degree holders under this program, for one year.

The Ministry of Education is currently working on regulations to permit universities to exit the market, covering land use, taxes, and so forth. According to another piece on this issue:

Under the new regulations, universities that fail to recruit up to 70 percent of their officially approved student numbers for three consecutive years will have their annual quotas cut by between 10 percent and 30 percent.

As a result of the regulations, no local universities will see their student quotas slashed until the 2011 school year, which critics say will hold back domestic education reforms.

Quotas slashed? Taiwan's universities have their intakes controlled by strict quotas based on a complex formula involving number of professors, facilities, etc. At one university I worked at part time, Arkham Institute of Technology, for example, the Applied Foreign Languages Dept was limited to 100 students for its annual intake, in two classes of 50 each. Thus each year 100 students joined the four year program in theory. In reality we usually had slightly more as students transferred in from elsewhere. Because the quota restricted the intake, and because the intake was treated like a layer cake, with the top scoring students on the college entrance exams going to top universities, the second best students to the second best schools, and so on down the line, in the 1990s and early 2000s the student body in any given department at Arkham was remarkably uniform in talent and ability.

However, the MoE used to regard unfilled quotas as a bad thing, and thus a trend many in the universities took hold as the number of warm bodies dried up: universities began poaching from the ranks below their quota limits. Thus at Arkham over the years I began to notice that the first 60 or so students were of the old quality, but the next 40 were not up to snuff -- they should have gone to less awesome schools. This process went on at many universities, and universities at the bottom of the ladder soon found themselves with no students at all, their students having been stolen by the universities ahead of them in the queue.

Hence, the MoE's decision to relax quota punishments means that low tier universities may continue on life support until 2011. Probably it will squeeze out another year, since 2012 is an election year and the body politic is not going to want to hear that Little Snowflake can't go to college....
____________
Daily Links

• An article in Journal of Current Chinese Affairs by two local deep blue academics which offers an overview of Chinese policy toward Taiwan.
• Chen Shui-bian now says he was victim of trickery by Roger Lin and never supported the lawsuit against the US government that claimed Taiwan was a US holding.
• AIG sells Nanshan Life to Hong Kong outfit for $2.1 billion.
• Global warming to triple rain over Taiwan: "number of days with 'excessive heat'" over 36 degree Celsius (97 degrees Fahrenheit) has doubled since 1961...." In fact before WWII it frosted every few years in the Taipei basin and bananas could not be grown there.

SPECIAL: Gorgeous photo essay on the production of food around the world entitled The End of Plenty. Thanks to Tobie Openshaw for this one
_______________________
[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!

Paper on Parade: Taiwan's Universities and Globalization

Students prepare for an economics test.

I had pretty much discontinued this feature for a few months while I posted Paul Barclay's wonderful translations of the saga of Kondo the Barbarian and his adventures among the aboriginal peoples of Taiwan. But with that series soon to wind down, I thought I'd resume my exploration of papers on topics of interest to me.

Today's paper is Taiwan's Responses to Globalisation: Internationalisation and Questing for World Class Universities by Song Mei-Mei and Tai Hsiou-Hsia which appeared two Novembers ago in the Asia Pacific Journal of Education¹. It gives a pretty clear idea of how the government is attempting to shape the university system in light of that primary Taiwanese anxiety: fear of being weeded out.

Beginning in 2000 with the arrival of the DPP in charge of the Executive Branch, the government launched a series of initiatives to change higher education in Taiwan. Song and Tsai note:

Obvious policy changes in higher education can be observed in various ways: diminishing state subsidies for the sector and the modification of its funding mechanism, increasing demands for accountability from colleges and universities, tighter bonds between universities and the industry, attempts to establish stronger ties with the international academic community, the pursuit of prestige in worldwide rankings, policy borrowing from developed countries, and the shift in state controls from regulation to supervision.

These were realized through initiatives like the Program for Promoting Academic Excellence of Universities (2000), Program to Promote International Competitiveness of Universities (2002), Program for Improving Research University Infrastructure (2002), Program for Expanding Overseas Student Recruitment (2003), Project for Developing Top-Notch Universities (2004) and several others.

Government policies in higher education are driven by fear of losing competitiveness, as Song and Tsai note several times in the paper:

The Ministry of Education (MOE) now faces the prevalence of globalisation and is starting to feel the pressure to make Taiwanese higher education more internationalised than it has been. It is deemed necessary to elevate the process of internationalisation to an institution level to extensively boost its integration with the global academic mainstream.

The response to globalization was thus greater integration, just as it is in the economy. Two major programs were erected to do this. The first was the Program to Promote International Competitiveness of Universities. Read carefully its five strategic initiatives:

1. Promoting international academic exchange activities;

2. Constructing an internationalised learning environment by encouraging
university courses instructed in English with a good support system for those
involved in the courses;

3. Encouraging universities to participate in international assessment as well as
professional accreditation in order to elevate university teaching and research
standards to international levels;

4. Encouraging universities to institute twinning programs with foreign
universities or to establish mutually recognised credit/degree systems; and

5. Establishing an English learning environment through enhanced internet
facilities.

I am fond of pointing out that in Taiwan "internationalization" is often synonymous with "more English" and sure, points 2 and 5 there overtly define internationalization as Englishization. The other three activities are basically international exchange programs. Bear in mind that the program did not contemplate building links by wholesale importation of quality foreign professors as is common in other countries.

The program is carried out through subsidies. At Taiwan universities a Taiwanese prof can make extra money for teaching in English, for example. International students are also heavily subsidized:

The rewards [for hosting international students] are based on a progressive scale where the higher the quota a university is able to meet, the larger the subsidies it receives. Programme subsidies went to 10 universities in 2005 and 13 universities in 2006, with a total amount of NT$49.4 million (US$1.5 million) and NT$54.3 million (US$1.6 million), respectively.

The paper then moves on to a discussion of the university subsidy program. As readers of this blog will be aware, the subsidy program caused a massive expansion of the university system from 28 in 1985 to 145 in 2005 as many new private universities open and many former vocational high schools upgraded to universities. Because the subsidy was calculated on a per-student basis (once a school had qualified by meeting infrastructure standards), universities were rewarded for taking on more and more students, resulting in last year's embarrassing situation in which the number of places in the university system exceeded the number of graduates from the nation's high schools. Quality collapsed.

In addition to integrating with the international academic world, Taiwan also pursed a series of policies to upgrade the quality of universities to international standards, spurred by similar programs in neighboring countries. Song and Tsai observe that this program, the Program for Promoting Academic Excellence of Universities (PPAEU) "was the first mega-sized project (in terms of budget) that was individually approved by the government for higher education development." The program was targeted on "economic competitiveness":

Science and engineering projects were greatly favoured, with disciplines that study nanotechnology, internet, wireless communication, electro-optical engineering, and biotechnology highly preferred by the government.the budget for the four approved projects in the humanities and social sciences accounted for only 15.69% of the total grant budget in the first phase, the lowest among all four disciplinary areas. This declined to only 3.29% in the second phase.

The program was carried out, again, through subsidies to relevant infrastructure, and to the relevant projects mentioned above. In this program too the government did not contemplate wrenching wholesale changes in the way education is carried out by importing good minds and changing the nature of university instruction. Despite the expressed idea of implementing the program in higher education, funding recipients were limited to the big established public schools.

Another program that encouraged the formation of research alliances -- again encouraged by subsidies -- also encountered the same problems:

After the proclamation that successful integrations were being rewarded, however, colleges and universities suddenly became enthusiastic about it, with more than four university alliances formed only three months after the policy announcement and virtually all public universities participating in some kind of alliance (Kao, 2002; Lin, 2002). The public was especially sceptical because most of these applicants failed to provide concrete plans to enhance research excellence. Even members of the Higher Education Macro Planning Committee, who started the idea for the plan, regarded RUIP as off-track because many universities “integrate only for the sake of integration” (Chang, 2002, para. 1). The frantic formation of alliances was also described as “the rich marrying the rich” where less competitive universities are left behind and there is further stratification of colleges and universities (Hsiao, 2002).

Similar outcomes were observed with other programs that rained money on the university system.

Song and Tsai summarize the policy trends at the end of the paper -- strong emphasis on research, further stratification of the university system to strengthen the major public universities while neglecting private institutions (which are for-profit), and the use of grant programs as advertizing. This led inevitably to accusations of partiality when universities were rejected:

One extreme example was the case of National Chung Cheng University, one of the five universities that was eliminated during the final round of the PDTNU grant. Chung Cheng’s secretary-general went on a 31-hour hunger strike in front of the MOE building to protest the decision, leading legislators to interfere with the MOE’s decision and even freeze project grants until the matter was resolved.

Song and Tsai had no space to say, but at that point Chung Cheng had already been deeply embarrassed when it dropped out of the ranks of leading universities when the Ministry of Education changed the ranking system to put an emphasis on published papers rather than infrastructure. One reason universities put so much pressure on professors to publish is that the papers are one of the major ways the university is evaluated by the Ministry.

Despite the grant programs, Song and Tsai identify fairness as a major issue:

In spite of such policy changes, the government continues to adhere to the mentality of giving every institution the same amount of resources regardless of their true needs. Therefore, one of the biggest obstacles in Taiwan’s road to academic excellence is resource deficiency brought about by the rapid expansion of higher education and the country’s flawed head-counting funding mechanism. Depleted by the large number of students and institutions, the state’s educational budget was not ample enough to allow any university to pursue excellence. This is confounded by the fact that the MOE curtails universities’ sources of income and caps the cost of tuition for public, as well as private, institutions. That is the reason behind the recent emergence of MOE programmes that aim to provide extra funding for key universities.

In other words, the government does not lack resources; what it lacks is the will to do what must be done, such as shut down the worst 100 universities and fire professors who lack PHDs and/or publications, and redistribute resources to universities that can use them the best. At present teacher salaries, tuition, and other aspects of university financial life remain closely controlled by the government.

Note also that the government conceives of internationalization in terms of establishing exchanges of links with other universities, and in terms of bringing in students, but not in the most important manner: raising salaries and bringing in quality professors from foreign universities -- upgrading the system through exchanges of actual human beings. In major universities in Europe and North America a significant number of professors are foreign; outside of English programs where they are necessary tokens, foreign professors are rare in Taiwan. As long as the Ministry continues to regard the system as something that is the object of mere I/O resource manipulations, Taiwan's university system will continue to lag the nations around it in the performance of its university system.

¹Song, Mei-Mei and Tai, Hsiou-Hsia. (2007) Taiwan's Responses to Globalisation: Internationalisation and Questing for World Class Universities, Asia Pacific Journal of Education, 27:3, 323 - 340

[Taiwan]

Sunday Media Round Up

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) has its paper on the China stimulus online here. The media is also reporting government plans to stimulate the development of more industrial clusters, and to encourage consumer spending.

The Wild Strawberries protest has entered its tenth day. The Taipei Times says that Ma has invited the students to negotiate with him. As if in response to the student protests, now going on in several cities, the Liberty Times said today that the jiao guan system, the posting of military officers to universities, is going to be revitalized and revived. In the martial law era these officers functioned as political officers who kept an eye on student political thinking. Today they do various administrative and counseling tasks, as well as teach the required courses in military science that all university students must take. Because this system is overwhelmingly and reliably pro-KMT and many within it worked to influence the students in that direction, the DPP had frozen the system and had been slowly reducing its influence and size. It is too early to say whether this represents a long-term move to politicize the university system, whose administrative apparatus already tends to be strongly pan-Blue, but it is not a hopeful sign. The media is also reporting that former Kaohsiung Mayor and DPP Presidential candidate Frank Hsieh is starting an alliance of lawyers to help future 'victims' of 'police abuse.'

The Solomons Star has a great article on the state of our democracy here. It's like reading news from that alternate universe I sometimes visit. Cindy Sui has a more measured but definitely good article on the Chen Shui-bian detention for BBC.

The net was abuzz with the report that Peru had referred to Regional Administrator Ma Ying-jeou as "President" in conjunction with the upcoming APEC meeting there. The Ma Administration hailed this as progress, though it refused to ask the representative from China to call him "President." KMT logic has it that whatever happens, whether they call Ma president or not, it is a sign that Ma's foreign policy is a success. In other news, Oceania is still at war with Eastasia.

If you find the political news too depressing, there is always this poetic article extolling the scenic wonders of Taiwan from Andrew Jeffords in the Financial Times.

[Taiwan]

Chinese Students to Come

The Ministry of Education (MOE) has been working on plans to allow students from China to study in Taiwan's universities. The local university count, now up to 170, is much too high and even though Taiwan's high school students were almost all permitted to enter college under the new national testing system, there are not enough local students.

What happened was that during the 1990s and under the later DPP administration, subsidies to universities increased rapidly, and many conglomerates with a construction company opened universities as a way to farm the government for subsidy money. Private universities, after all, are for-profit entities and many of them quietly return profits to their owners. When a university has a certain level of facilities, for example a lighted track -- a least one university I know qualified with a track paved with tarmac -- and a certain number of students, it automatically qualifies for subsidies. The government is unwilling to shut down universities though many are unneeded, partly because they function as jobs programs for the PHD holders Taiwan is also now churning out in overly large quantities. This cycle of subsidy - expansion - more subsidy - more expansion appears to have hit its limit. Thus one proposed solution has been importing warm bodies from China.

During the election Ma promised to do this, and now the numbers are in:

Under the plan, Chinese students from universities and colleges with “distinguished academic reputations” would be allowed to study in the country, with numbers limited to between 0.5 percent and 1 percent of total nationwide enrollment at colleges, four-year technology institutions and two-year junior technological and vocational education colleges.

The estimated number of Chinese students coming to Taiwan to study each year would be between 1,000 and 2,000, based on the 200,000 vacancies at 170 institutions nationwide, Vice Minister of Education Lu Mu-lin (呂木琳) told the press conference.

Some of the local papers were reporting that the students would receive Taiwan government scholarships but the MOE has ruled that out: no gov't scholarships for these students. Other restrictions, such as no future residency or jobs here in Taiwan, would also apply. Like the promised tourist bonanza from China that hasn't materialized, the number is too low to have any marked effect on the university system here.

[Taiwan]

Interviewing the Student Protesters in Tainan

Students chant during the student protests across campuses nationwide. This video was taken at NCKU on the afternoon of Nov 10, 2008.

I stopped by the student protest in front of the gate of NCKU on Da Shue Rd in Tainan and spoke to a spokesperson for the protesters:

How long are you going to be out here?

"We are going to stay until tuesday. If the government hasn't given us a response by then, we'll probably continue. But we'll vote on that. If everyone decides to continue, then we'll continue."

Has the government contacted you yet?

They've talked to the people in Taipei, but not directly to us. But we are in contact with Taipei and Taichung, where we are carrying out this activity as well. If they get a response in Taipei we'll hear about it.

So what do you call yourselves? The Wild Strawberries? Why that?

Because people say -- in Taiwan many of the media organizations say -- that young people are just like strawberries [weak and easily bruised --mt]. We think we're not like that, and we wanted to show that we could do something.

So you didn't want to recall the "White Lily" student movement of the late 1980s?

We didn't really hope to do that. Many of those people have gone on to enter political parties, and we didn't want people to see us as supporting or connected to one party or the other.

What are these three goals?

First, we hope that President Ma and Premier Liu will apologize for the recent police violence. Our second goal is that the heads of the National Police Administration and the National Security Administration step down. Third, we hope that the Assembly and Parade Law will be revised. We ask that it be revised in four directions. First, we'd like to change the application for a parade permit to a notification system, just like in the US, where you just notify the police that you will march, instead of asking permission to hold a march. That way the police will not be saying who can protest and who can't. The second thing we want changed is the Police Administrative Judgment authority. At present the police can decide when they will go arrest people and when they won't. [drowned out by traffic and crowd noises.] The third change we want is that at present violations of the Assembly and Parade Law are criminal acts under the law and determined under criminal law, so you can be sent to jail for a year or two years, for example. We believe that this is against the freedom of the people. We want that changed so that violations fall under the administrative laws and only fines are handed out for violations of the Assembly and Parade Law, so you won't get a year or two for violations of the law. Finally, we want them to lift the restrictions on places where assemblies and parades can be held. These restrictions are a violation of the basic rights and freedoms laid out in the Constitution. Now [the Assembly and Parade] law is clearly of lower status than the Constitution, but it has [unintelligible] the Constitution. So we think it should be revised.

NOTES: The interview was conducted in Chinese and recorded on my Canon Powershot IS S5 with the permission of the speaker. This is a translation, with some of the more informal and repetitive language paraphrased. Between the passers-by, the protesters chanting, and the traffic, a few parts are not clear.

UPDATE: ETaiwan News' excellent article on the Wild Strawberry protests.

[Taiwan]

Student Protests in Tainan

Two images of the student protests in Tainan. Braving the rain, roughly 30-50 students come out to ask for Ma to apologize, senior police officials to step down, and most importantly, reform of the Assembly and Parade law, a relic of the martial law era that is often used to shut down protests. These student protests are separate from the DPP protests and senior DPP who have appeared at them have been asked to leave. Students at leading universities around the island have begun protesting in its major cities since the end of the protests again the Chen Yunlin visit to Taiwan.

UPDATE: Monday's Taipei Times article on the student protests

UPDATE 2: Janice says in the comment

The movement's main website:
http://action1106.blogspot.com/

Other related weblinks:
http://taichung.action1106.org/
http://tainan.action1106.org/
http://hsinchu.action1106.org/
http://wiki.action1106.org/
http://map.action1106.org/
http://taipak2008.pbwiki.com/FrontPage

[Taiwan]

Another One Bites the Intellectual Upper Crust

The Liberty Times reports that another foreign university instructor, this one at beautiful Chinan University in Puli, is being publicly sued instead of privately reprimanded, for intemperate remarks.... it's yet another sign that the stuff Americans say to each other all the time is legally actionable here in Taiwan -- so watch your mouth!

罵系主任「UP YOURS」 暨大洋教師被訴

〔記者陳鳳麗∕南投報導〕罵人「UP YOURS」是會吃上官司的！

南投地檢署檢察官請專家翻譯後，24日依妨害名譽罪嫌起訴罵同系老師「UP YOURS」的國立暨南大學外文系外籍老師。

辯「隨便你」否認侮辱

起訴書指出，該案發生在去年8月，當時擔任暨大外文系系主任的男副教授周曉青，在該系辦公室內要同系美籍男教師LOREN ALLEN BILLINGS歸還系上的吸塵器，美籍教師不悅地指責系主任不該鎖上系會議室和儲物室，雙方為此起爭執。外籍老師以英文對著周曉青說：「UP YOURS」及「YOU ARE THE MOST BARBARIC CHINESE.（你是最野蠻的中國人）」，周曉青認為他公然污辱，遂向埔里警分局提告。

美籍教師應訊時否認他說了「YOU ARE THE MOST BARBARIC CHINESE.」等語，但承認說了「UP YOURS」。而他辯稱該句英文的意思是「別管了」、「隨便你」的意思。

檢察官請學者翻譯解釋

周曉青向偵辦該案的檢察官劉仁慈指出，「UP YOURS」是極粗野的話，有「比出中指且做出攪動的動作」。劉仁慈檢察官為慎重起見，函請國立台灣師範大學的學者幫忙翻譯解釋，經該校回函表明該語的確是不雅粗魯之語後，確認這名外籍老師的說法不可採信，昨日偵結該案，認為該外師有妨害名譽之嫌而起訴。

周曉青表示，提告並非排外、仇外，也不是為了要報復，而是希望藉此嚴正要求外籍老師絕不能對同事或學生使用語言暴力，更希望有關單位能正視外國人在台灣產生的負面情緒或不當行徑的問題。

周曉青說，LOREN ALLEN BILLINGS在系上已不是第一次出現不雅的話語及動作，過去就有老師提出，也有學生反映過；知識份子絕不能用語言暴力傷害知識份子。

According to the report, Billings admits saying "Up yours" but denies saying "You are the most barbaric Chinese" -- which is extremely awkward English, and would be a highly unusual construction for an educated native speaker to evolve. On the face of it, I don't believe Billings ever made that remark (god knows what was actually said); it also has a made-up ring to it because it appears to push so many cultural buttons (similar to the utterly false accusation that a teacher at my university had used the term "Chinese dog" directed at a student). From my totally uninvolved angle this looks like a typical blown up university incident, in which from some tiny nub of truth evolves a fantastic and elaborate tale of abuse. The remark in the concluding paragraph that Billings has done this before is a signal that he is probably not a popular teacher and therefore an easy target.

My favorite part of this is the plaintiff's remarks:

周曉青表示，提告並非排外、仇外，也不是為了要報復，而是希望藉此嚴正要求外籍老師絕不能對同事或學生使用語言暴力，更希望有關單位能正視外國人在台灣產生的負面情緒或不當行徑的問題。

Chou Shao-ching said that the suit was not a rejection of foreigners or prejudice, nor was it about revenge, but in the hope that through this, it would be seriously demanded that foreign teachers not speak to their coworkers or students using violent language, and also that the authorities should pay attention to the negative mood produced by, and inappropriate behavior of, foreigners in Taiwan.

ROFLMAO. Although this suit is not about ethnic prejudices, nevertheless the plaintiff hopes that the authorities would pay attention to the problems foreigners cause. You just can't make up dialogue like that....

[Taiwan]

"Both sides are tied by blood..."

"Signs of warming ties" is how the international media defines KMT Chairman Wu Po-hsiung's current visit to China. Reuters reports:

China and Taiwan edged closer to a resumption of fence-mending talks on Tuesday when the chairman of the island's ruling party echoed the Chinese line that both sides are part of a single nation.

China, which has claimed Taiwan as its own since their split in 1949 amid civil war, has softened its policy towards the self-ruled island from pushing for unification with the threat of force to one of preventing a declaration of independence.

"Both sides are tied by blood to the Chinese nation and this cannot be obliterated by anyone," Taiwan's Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang (KMT), Chairman Wu Poh-hsiung said in Nanjing, the capital when the KMT ruled all of China.

Taiwan's new president, Ma Ying-jeou, also made the pledge -- a move Beijing considers a political necessity for talks frozen since 1999 to resume -- in his May 20 inauguration speech.

On the thread on Ma's inaugural speech we've been discussing exactly what Ma meant when he said that the "two sides of the Strait are both Chunghwa minzu." Reuters apparently thinks it is a reference to an ethnic construction of Chinese identity, coded assimilationist rhetoric. Wu himself neatly straddles many of the ethnic identity issues in Taiwan. Wu is a Hakka, who were some of the earliest migrants to Taiwan. The Hakka constitute only a minuscule fraction of the people in China, but were something like 25% of the pre-1949 Taiwan population. "Being Hakka" is further confused because many Hakkas are Sinicized aboriginal groups who "became Hakka" when they assimilated to the dominant colonial majority. There is a long history of conflict between Hakka and non-Hakka (Hoklo) immigrants to Taiwan, with the result that the Hakka are predominantly pro-KMT, wooed by that party as part of its strategy of divide-n-rule based on ethnic politics. Hence the many layers of meaning in Wu telling an official of China that he is "of the same blood." .

Reuters reports:

China spurned the DPP, which was routed in the March presidential elections by the KMT. The Nationalists oppose independence but are in no hurry to get into bed with China politically.

"In no hurry to get into bed with China politically." It is May of 2008, the KMT and the CCP have been talking to each other privately for many years, and still no international media publication has mentioned the back channel talks. I guess since it's been going on for years, it's not news....

Another key cross-strait meeting is happening this week in Kaohsiung where university presidents from China and Taiwan are meeting to discuss exchanges.

Presidents of both Taiwanese and Chinese universities met in southern Taiwan's Kaohsiung County Monday to share views on potential academic exchanges among the universities.

The conference was held at the I-Shou University in the southern county, and was followed by a symposium on science and technology covering topics in material science, environmental science, life science, and telecommunications.

Sixteen universities participated, including China's Qingdao University and Ocean University of China as well as National Cheng Kung University and National University of Kaohsiung in Taiwan.

Conference participants exchanged views on the universities' educational systems, enrollment, internationalization, management, and administrative systems.

Credit system and a joint degree program that requires certain years of learning in a domestic school and a couple of years in a foreign school were two focuses of discussions.

Student exchanges are already underway; I have two Chinese exchange students in my classes here at NCKU. The talks are being held against the backdrop of increasing financial pressure on Taiwan's universities. The subsidy system set up in the 1990s encouraged a massive expansion in the university system (many construction firms opened universities to farm the government subsidy regime) resulting in a shortage of warm bodies to fill classrooms -- forcing universities to raise tuition to stay alive -- a perverse effect of subsidies intended to make it easier for kids to go to college. Further, with many universities having opened graduate and PHD programs in recent years, there is a steady and increasing supply of new PHDs entering the local academic market looking for work. Taiwan universities have been arguing that the island should open to students from China to fill the empty seats.

On the lighter side of cross-strait relations, Taiwan's wedding photo business is hopping on the cargo cult bandwagon with the claim that 5,000 couples from China will be visiting to have wedding photos done here....

About 5,000 couples from China will get wedding photos taken at Taiwan's world-renowned studios, which seldom receive them now due to political tensions, as part of a travel agreement, an industry source said on Monday.

A cultural promotion company close to the Chinese government has agreed with Taiwan's Saromant International Wedding Photo Group chain to send the couples over on direct weekend flights expected to begin in July pending a long-awaited agreement between the two sides, said chain CEO Celine Liu.

About 20 couples from Beijing have signed for the first weekend flight, Liu told Reuters.

Taiwan, with 1,300 wedding studios seeking new business as local clients save their money in tight economic times, has long been known among ethnic Chinese in Hong Kong, Southeast Asia and the United States for packages that include attire for the bride and groom plus access to coastal or mountain photo scenery.

The wedding photo business is one of Taiwan's most fascinating cultural products.

MEDIA NOTES: Reuters still has China and Taiwan "splitting in 1949" although Taiwan was not owned by China at that time, but by Japan.

[Taiwan]

Nanotechnology Development in Taiwan

One aspect of economy policy under the DPP is its forward looking technological aspects, whereas Ma's economic proposals, under Siew, are based on a back-to-the-future 1970s model that involves spraying concrete around Taiwan like so much fake snow at a Christmas party. A key emerging industry in world technology markets is nanotechnology, the science of "understanding and control of matter at dimensions of roughly 1 to 100 nanometers (a billionth of a meter; a sheet of paper is 100,000 nm)," and Taiwan has pursued it with vigor:

The government is planning to appropriate NT$23 billion (US$726 million) to fund the second stage of the "Taiwan National Science and Technology Program for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology" slated for 2009-2014, officials at the cabinet-level National Science Council (NSC) said Tuesday.

The first stage, which began in 2003 with NT$17.8 billion in funding, will conclude by the end of this year, officials told reporters.

In the first phase, more than 4,000 science research papers have been generated to date, dozens of top-notch research teams were initiated, and ties between industry, university, and research institutions have been strengthened, they said.

Program Director Wu Maw-kuen, who is also the director of the Institute of Physics under Taiwan's top research institute Academia Sinica, said the program office is now working on the outlines of the next phase by determining which items of research are worth further financial support.

Wu said the focus of the next stage will be nano-electronic and optoelectronic technology, nano-scale instruments, nanotechnology for energy and environmental applications, nano-scale biomedical research, and the various technologies' utilization in potential and traditional industries.

How does this sum compare? It is about half the US$1.444 billion the US Nanotechnology Initiative is spreading across 13 US government departments for nanotech research, though Taiwan's GDP is just a fraction of US GDP. Additionally, the Taichung Science Park was originally intended to be nanotech oriented.

The article also alludes to a key function and metric of Taiwan's universities: producing papers for foreign consumption. Pressure to publish in Taiwan universities is excruciating -- and not merely to publish, but to publish in top journals (the importance of chasing status in Chinese cultural is instrumental in this push). At NCKU where I am doing a PHD in international business, my fellow students generally try and place papers in just the top 2 or 3 journals. One can only imagine what will happen when the coming wave from China breaks over the world of academic journals.

One perennial problem in Taiwan's development is the university- government-industry triumvirate: the first leg is only weakly linked to the second and third. The government has been working on integrating the universities more into national industrial development. Part of the problem is that the technocracy responsible for the major input into government economic and technology policy formation is not university-based, but rather holds court in the think tanks in Taipei, according to a knowledgeable person I spoke to a couple of months ago, and it sees the universities as places for producing papers Taiwan can use to validate itself on the world stage (hence the government's proud announcement that its nanotech initiative had generated 4,000 papers). Another problem is the rigid execution so common in Taiwan's public policy -- all departments are ordered to have "industry-university cooperation" and so, by god, they shall. At one university I taught at "industry-university cooperation" in my department consisted of a proposal to teach English at a local airline. The private for-profit universities often frankly see such programs as merely another profit center.

Still other problems are the lack of high-quality universities -- the so-called "universities of technology" are largely voc-ed finishing schools that generally do not have access to high quality students, especially innovative grad students, so necessary for technology development programs. The testing system tends to shunt such students into the national universities, and when profs hit the big-time, they tend to move to one of the national schools as well. The Ministry of Education is often roundly criticized by the locals, but making modernity more than just a mask in the local universities is a daunting task.

[Taiwan]