Ma government repays its supporters

Contemplating lunch?

The fearsome concentration of wealth in Taiwan has grown faster than most places....

The number of people whose liquid assets are worth US$1 million or more in Taiwan increased 11.8 percent last year to 125,000 — the biggest growth among the four economies known as the Asian Tigers, according to a wealth report published by Aspire Lifestyles.

Note that this is occurring as the economy lurches to a halt and income remains stagnant. The Ma Administration has rewarded its 1% supporters with delays and obfuscations on the stock transaction tax (finally imposed this year), the real estate assessment, capital gains tax, and other policies which hinder the transfer wealth from the middle and lower classes to the rich. Oh, and in 2009 the Ma Administration lowered the inheritance tax from 50% to 10%. Current KMT Presidential Candidate, Eric Chu, knowing on which side the KMT mian bao gets its 1% butter, is pandering to this crowd with calls saying the capital gains tax had been a mistake. The public knows this, one reason why Chu's numbers are well below 20% now.

The resulting housing bubble is devouring Taiwan, but it is also devouring the KMT. Keelung and Taoyuan are both becoming more pan-Green as young people -- overwhelmingly Green -- move out to those areas to find less expensive housing, changing the demographics of once solidly blue areas...
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Daily Links:

• CPI blog is already flooded with stuff on the election. Love or Bread: Public Opinion on X-strait relations during the Ma era * Cross-Strait Air Links Liberalization
• Green party campaign video
• The Pro-annexation left tries to prosyletize abroad
• DPP approves list of other party candidates it will support
• FACTOID on a hospital handout: Taiwan annually uses 327 million sleeping pills of various types.

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[Taiwan] Don't miss the comments below! And check out my blog and its sidebars for events, links to previous posts and picture posts, and scores of links to other Taiwan blogs and forums!

Nelson Report on the US Arms Sales

Gardens

The Nelson Report on the arms package for Taiwan.... and don't miss this threat from a PLA general. And this summary of the Atlantic Council Meeting. Also 5 things that should be in the arms sale. What they all show is how Beijing's squalling -- note, nothing concrete ever occurs -- has an effect on arms sales. But US consumer goods, movies, Chinese students, etc all flow unabated. There's a lesson there, if only someone in Washington will read it.

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MORE FROM THE CHINA CAUCUS BRIEF...Your Editor attended the excellent Atlantic Council discussion on the anticipated $1-bil US arms package coming soon for Taiwan...the first in over 4 years, it was noted. Good write-up by the US Naval Institute, below, saves us deciphering our notes.

Of course no way will Beijing be happy about it, but in response to our question, the panel moderated by Foreign Policy Asia Editor Isaac Stone Fish thought it might be less intrusive in US-China relations to do this while the KMT is in power, rather than accentuating China's obvious angst at the imminent return of the DPP, via the Jan. 16 elections.

Much discussion also of what now seems a serious Taiwanese effort to actually build some badly-needed conventional submarines, rather than the more PR-focused demand of the past decade on the US to somehow provide them, going back to the start of the last Bush administration.

A younger audience member asked how today's "Taiwan Lobby" compared to Olden Times, allowing Your Editor the chance to recall the near-death experience of being stalked by Madame Chiang herself, arm in arm with Walter Judd, back during the writing of the Taiwan Relations Act.

Now that was the Taiwan Lobby!

Panel: Anticipated U.S. Arms Sales to Taiwan Will Strain Relations With Beijing. "The Taiwanese presidential elections next month - with a change in party control expected and the likely announcement of a new billion-dollar U.S. arms sale to Taipei - will not only "send a signal to Beijing" but likely will, in the short run, increase tensions between Washington and the People's Republic of China, a panel of experts on the region said Wednesday. Speaking at the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C., Ian Easton, a research fellow at Project 2049, said the reported U.S. sales under the Taiwan Relations Act likely will include up to four Perry-class frigates, amphibious assault vehicles, Boeing Apache helicopters and a variety of missiles for Taiwan's army. No formal package has yet been sent to Congress, so the exact dollar amount requested and numbers and types of equipment are not publicly known. Arms sales, which have been on hold for more than four years, are "the most visible" interaction between the United States and Taiwan, a nation that otherwise is "almost completely marginalized" internationally. "I can assure you China will yell and scream no matter what is in [President Barack] Obama's package," Robert Manning of the Atlantic Council added. He expects Taiwan to be looking for improved anti-submarine warfare capability even as it looks to build up its own submarine fleet. The arms sales "do complicate [Chinese] war planning . . . they have to plan accordingly" to the changed equation in equipment and training, Easton added. "[China's People's Liberation Army] has no experience" with a blockade and possible invasion on this scale when looking at Taiwan across the straits from mainland China. Joanne Yu Taylor of RAND said Taiwan's Democratic Progressive Party, which is expected to win the election, will be looking at making "a great push for indigenous defense" capability, especially in cyber, aerospace and maritime. The party signaled such moves in the 12 Blue Papers it has recently produced on Taiwanese defense. But the reality for Taiwan, even with a change in governmental control, won't be much different than it is now. "Its Number One security threat is China, [and its] Number One defender, the U.S.," said Taylor." http://news.usni.org/2015/12/09/panel-anticipated-u-s-arms-sales-to-taiwan-will-strain-relations-with-beijing
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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!

The aboriginal struggle continues

Glorious day out there today on the bike....

In the Qing Dynasty the aborigines were divided into two groups, the "cooked" who had been assimilated to Han culture to some degree, and the "raw", who remained free of Qing rule. This marvelous piece entitled The Tribe That Disappeared from Songshan Airport on a woman's discovery of her Ketagalan roots, reproduces a poem about the way the assimilated aborigines were abused and subjected to theft of land.

There was a poem during Qing rule called An Ode to the Cooked Tribes:

The Raw Tribes are feared as tigers, but the Cooked Tribes are treated like the dirt; trembling before the fierce and trampling the weak, just because the people lack the wisdom of ages.

A cooked tribesman obeys the law and works the field, but the day comes when a Chinese sets his sights on the tribesman’s land; he takes away the fields and the tribesman starves, regretting becoming “cooked.”

The tribesman hears of an official in the city and treks to the palace and kowtows before him in appeal; but his words are as the chirping of quails, and the official cannot understand at all.

His sad tales not finished, the official loses patience; the official orders the tribesman be beaten. The tribesman listens to the verdict with head lowered: “Stupid savage! Do as I say, give your fields to the Chinese man, who is your brother in every way!”

What a shame! The raw tribesmen are forced to kill, and the cooked tribesmen are bullied. Would our Chinese officials listen to these voices?

Also, an aboriginal hunter harvesting animals in the mountains was given a harsh three year sentence...

Two years ago, a Bunun called Wang Guang-lu from Hairui Township in Taitung County was hunting Formosan serow (a kind of goat) and Reeve's muntjac (one of the three rare species of deer in Taiwan) with a shotgun because his 92-year-old mother wanted to eat fresh game.

Wang was caught by the police and sentenced to three years and six months in jail. Chen Cai-yi, a lawyer from Legal Aid Foundation, considered the verdict unacceptable because, "the ruling of this case was even more serious than that of a murder case.”

China Times reports, Wang says normal pork is too greasy and makes his mother nauseous and dizzy. This is why he went hunting in the mountains with a shotgun. He didn’t expect the sentence to be this serious.

The court sentenced Wang to three years and six months in jail, saying he violated the Controlling Guns, Ammunition and Knives Act and Wildlife Conservation Act. The Supreme Court also fined him NT$ 70,000 (approximately US$ 2,138). The case was rendered last month.

Richard Foster, hiker extraordinaire, pointed out on my Facebook that the Serow is actually a bovine, not a kind of goat, and Taiwan's only native bovine. Foster noted:

FYI The best place to see the serow, muntjac, flying squirrels, other mammals, Swinhoe/Micado pheasants is at dusk or later near the Forestry Bureau office at km50 on the Dasyueshan road. Also drive down the road after dark with flashlights looking for eyeshine. Feel free to stop at any of the 3 police stations on the road and thank them for protecting the forest.

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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!

Taiwan 2016 is up and running at China Pol Institute at U of Nottingham

Hmmm... who should I vote for?

It's out! Taiwan 2016 blog on the Taiwan elections at the China Policy Institute is up and running. Should be another round of rich, wonderful commentary. Dr. Jon Sullivan of the U of Nottingham, founder and overseer of the blog, writes:

The Taiwan 2016 blog, in association with the Taiwan Studies Program at the University of Nottingham, is a platform for scholarly analysis and commentary about Taiwan and the elections. The blog privileges no political position, but aims to provide a space in which various perspectives and insights can be put forward in a scholarly fashion for reasoned debate. The blog will feature many of the most renowned Taiwan experts from around the world, and will run from now until after the elections in January.

Put this on in your links. Should be great!
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KMT Veep Choice J-Wang is Awesome UPDATE X2

Keepin' the construction-industrial state chugging along.

UPDATE: Don't miss this excellent post about how the Blue candidates are connected to the deaths of 1980s independence and democracy activists.

I have to admit I've been terribly missing former Presidential candidate Hung Hsiu-chu, who had a gift for alienating voters, but Eric Chu, KMT Chairman and Presidential candidate, has attempted to right things with me by appointing the awesome Jennifer Wang as his Vice Presidential Candidate. Joey Neihu, the alleged offspring of Johnny Neihu and Phyllis Diller, conceived under a full moon and grown in a petri dish, has the call:

Last month, Chu finally selected his running mate for the election, Jennifer Wang (王如玄). Problem. The staff at KMT HQ clearly didn’t do enough vetting. The brown stuff duly hit the fan as the media started to delve into Wang’s financial background. Following days of intense media speculation, Wang made public a list of assets and properties under her and her husband’s names: together they own four plots of land, seven buildings and possess NT$28.59 million in savings. Rumors persist over past speculative sales of military housing units.

This is all rather unfortunate, since Wang and her hubby, not exactly short for cash, rent a taxpayer-funded government dormitory, provided at a highly-subsidized rent — allegedly NT$2,000 per month. It gets worse: irony of ironies, Wang’s husband is director of the Judicial Yuan Department of Government Ethics. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

Solidaritytw translates some poll data. DPP team Tsai-Chen continues its enormous lead over the KMT's Chu-Wang. It also said that 65% polled think Wang is hurting the KMT. Solidarity perspicaciously comments:

SET-TV notes that the farther north the respondents are the more of them believe Wang is hurting the ticket, indicating she’s doing the most damage within the home territory the KMT can’t afford to lose.

Indeed. Not only is Wang and her real estate kingdom hurting the KMT in its core areas, the party's inept response ("it was all legal") hasn't helped. The fact that it was legal is what makes it so awful; the System has normalized such behavior. Jason Hu, the savvy politico, former three-term mayor of Taichung, and now Chair of the Chu-Wang comedy team, observed publicly that it is hurting the campaign (see Solidarity). He also noted that Wang is a complete tyro who has never campaigned.

As Joey Neihu alluded to above, the Wang choice has raised another issue for Eric Chu, that of his competence. All across Taiwan surely many heads are coming to the same conclusion: why did his team do such a poor job of vetting and preparing this person for the position? Chu is simply -- incompetent. We've already had eight years of that, people must be saying to themselves...

UPDATED: I went to look at the Wayback Machine to see what edits were made to Wang's Chinese Wiki page after she jumped on board the Chu campaign. Most prominently, the Nov 19 version of her Wiki page retrieved from the Wayback Machine has no section on her humble origins, which the current page does.
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Chen Deming goes Godwin

'Where such laws hold,' said Gandalf, 'it is also the custom for ambassadors to use less insolence. But no one has threatened you. You have naught to fear from us, until your errand is done. But unless your master has come to new wisdom, then with all his servants you will be in great peril.'

Brainless, belligerent PRC envoy to the KMT went all Godwin this week, comparing DPP Presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen and her popularity to Hitler (TT):

Chen said that while people do make correct judgements, sometimes it takes time for them to gain an understanding of the problems, citing Germany under the rule of Hitler during World War II as an example.

“The German people elected Hitler as their leader with a big majority, which in the end caused a tragedy that was mourned by the whole world. Germany was the victim and the German people were subjected to the greatest woes,” Chen was quoted as saying.

The Hitler comparison caught a lot of attention among foreigners, but in fact Chen was threatening to kill Taiwanese and take their island in the usual PRC manner: Tsai would lead them to disaster! The disaster is the PRC attack on Taiwan, of course.

ALSO: Frozen Garlic has a laff.

UPDATE: Commenter observes:

Apart from the stupidity to refer to Hitler at all, there are at least two factual errors/misrepresentations in this short paragraph by Chen Deming: Hitler himself was never elected at all let alone with a big majority. His party became the strongest party in 1933 but only got a small majority together with the Conservatives above the other parties.

To name Germany a 'victim' blandly disregards all the other countries and peoples who were hit much harder during WW II. It also neglects that Germany started WW II in the first place. This is revisionism of history, a technique not unknown to the PRC (and many other countries). btw I'm German

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Daily Links;

• Taiwan pushing the US for subs.
• Pro-KMT paper criticizes KMT Veep pick Jennifer Wang for her housing speculation. Basically, she's a daily reminder that the KMT is a party in which connected insiders can make a rich living off the government.
• Manila paper on China's expectations of conflict over Taiwan
• The beautiful blog Synapticism on Nanfangao, with pics, of course. 
• Solidarity with a great post on population changes between 1974-2014 for regions in Taiwan and also notes TISR poll which shows that pan-Green is now number 1 political ID in Taiwan.

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[Taiwan] Don't miss the comments below! And check out my blog and its sidebars for events, links to previous posts and picture posts, and scores of links to other Taiwan blogs and forums!

Remarks of Ian Easton of Project 2049 Institute at FAPA Board Meeting Banquet

Project 2049 is a strong supporter of Taiwan...

Prepared Remarks of

Ian Easton

Research Fellow, Project 2049 Institute

at

FAPA Board Meeting Banquet

"The Future of U.S.-Taiwan Security Relations"

Hilton Crystal City Hotel in Arlington, Virginia

December 5, 2015

Ladies and Gentlemen, a very good evening to you all. Da-gay He! [How is everybody?] Da-gay jia-ba-bway? [Did you get enough to eat?] Wo-shee Yi Si-an. [My name is 易思安]

Please allow me, first and foremost, to extend my appreciation to FAPA President Mark Kao and Dr. Gerrit van der Wees for the kind invitation. Thank you for the honor to be here as part of
this banquet.

Tonight you are all gathered together in professional and personal friendship with one supreme goal: to keep Taiwan and her people free. Free politically and free from Chinese coercion. Free to exist and work toward the day when she can be recognized as a respected member of the international community. [click on READ MORE below]

KMT continues to push bogus "reforms" of the government

Exploring.

Realizing that it can't win, the KMT is talking about Constitutional "reform".  FocusTaiwan has the list of KMT Presidential candidate and Party Chairman Eric Chu's suggestions:

....he would push for an amendment to the Constitution that would require legislative approval to confirm the appointment of the country's premier.

....will also include lowering the voting age from 20 to 18 and allowing absentee voting,

...He also proposed a change that would allow the president to report to and take questions from the Legislature and he suggested that the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) also adopt such a proposal, which he said should be implement within the first year of the new government.

Two of these three are intended to move the power from the Executive to the legislature, in anticipation of continued KMT influence there, and to rein in Tsai's ability to make her own policy. The absentee voting is to enable more Taiwan businessmen in China to vote, on the assumption that they will vote KMT, or that China can force them to.

These are not new ideas. Since Tsai has emerged as the frontrunner and likely next President, the KMT has been talking about having the legislature approve the Premier (April, for example). Back in January the KMT was already advocating these "reforms." The KMT will piously tell you that prior to 1997 it used to do that -- as if in the party-state era the legislature was independent of the KMT could reject a premier. LOL.

Also this week two announcements from the KMT. Former Taichung mayor Jason Hu was appointed Campaign manager and former presidential candidate Hung Hsiu-chu was given the empty position of chief advisor. Displays of unity followed, because there has been much grumbling among the Deep Deep Blues since Hung was displaced by Chu, and some were threatening not to come out and vote.

The Taipei Times interpreted all the swirling controversy around KMT vice presidential candidate as a KMT smokescreen to protect Eric Chu from scrutiny by the media, which in typical Taiwan Golden Retriever style has been focused on Jenny Wang's real estate deals. But judging from the way KMT candidates are typically protected by the media, I doubt that the KMT needed anything so powerful. A conspiracy theory among pan-Greens argues that Wang was chosen to take the blame when Chu loses.

Most interesting to me was the brief surfacing of the jockeying for the post-election KMT Chairman position. A piece translated by the indefatigable Solidarity observed that Hung wants to be Chair. However, it contended, because the KMT has rulz that say the President must be the Chairman, if Chu steps down because of the election loss, it might "default" to Ma. Of course, last year Ma stepped aside? up? to enable Chu to become the Chairman. So much for the rulz [WARNING: MAY CONTAIN RULES-LIKE SUBSTANCE]...

Lots of watchers feel that Ma will do much damage to Taiwan in the interregnum between the election and Tsai's assumption of the Presidency in May. I am not so sure. Ma is an ideologue whose identity is entirely KMT and ROC and for such individuals, the real battle is for control of the Party. I suspect he's going to expend tons of energy in trying to become Chair after Chu steps down and retain that post after he has to step down as President (when he will not by default become Chair).
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Hung Tz-yung Ad.

Advertizement for Hung Tz-yung, running for the legislature in Taichung. She was galvanized by the death of her brother, Hung Chung-chiu, at the hands of military.

Hung is running for the New Power Party (NPP) -- she is interviewed at New Bloom. This ad emphasizes the troubles faced by the young in Taiwan's stagnant economy. Tracy Chapman sings Bob Dylan's The Times They are a-Changing in the background. A deeply moving ad.
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WARNING: MRT Rant copycats want your $$

People fish for lots of things in Taiwan.

The MRT incident involving using racist/xenophobic/sexist attacks as a suit-baiting may be generating copycats. A friend posted this to his Facebook:

So here's the thing, I'm wondering if the idea of insulting the expat, getting a rise out of him, seeing if he insults or assaults you physically so that you can get money out of him, is this a "thing" now? My son and I just had our little episode outside of a Watson's in Xinzhuang. The guy even threw beetle-nut husks at us as we were getting into our car. Two things saved him: 1. He insulted me and not my son 2. My phone is full and couldn't record a video of his sorry a#%!

Be on the lookout for this, keep your cool. As long as you do not swear and do not get physical, you should be fine. Exit the area ASAP if possible. My friend said that this guy not only screamed at him, but also attempted to block him from pulling out of his parking space. He obviously wanted my friend to attack him...
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.... it is estimated that more than 200 million animals are set free through this practice in Taiwan every year....

An electronic billboard flashes DPP candidate ads, KMT candidate ads, and ordinary ads, one after another.

From Su S, Cassey P, Vall-llosera M, Blackburn TM (2015) Going Cheap: Determinants of Bird Price in the Taiwanese Pet Market. PLoS ONE 10(5): e0127482. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0127482

Taiwan presents an excellent example for studying features of the bird trade in Asian countries [20]. First, cultural practices relating to the bird trade, such as prayer release, singing competitions and ‘bird-walking’ (the avian equivalent of dog-walking, where birds are taken out in cages for fresh air), are very popular in Taiwan. Prayer animal release is a common religious activity in Asia [20]: it is estimated that more than 200 million animals are set free through this practice in Taiwan every year [21,22]. Such a high frequency of releases may be an important factor contributing to invasions by alien bird species [5,23–26]. Second, Taiwan is a major wildlife trade hub from where species are re-exported to other Asian countries, such as Malaysia and Singapore [20,27,28]. Third, Taiwan is separated from the nearest continent by a >100 km ocean strait, meaning that it is relatively straightforward to define native versus alien species. Finally, alien bird species have proved to be a conservation threat in Taiwan through actual and potential hybridization with native bird species [29–31].

From The wildlife pet trade as a driver of introduction and establishment in alien birds in Taiwan. Shan Su, Phillip Cassey, Tim M. Blackburn Biol Invasions DOI 10.1007/s10530-015-1003-3

Taiwan has an extremely active trade in alien cage birds. More than 180,000 individuals of over 200 parrot species were imported there between 2001 and 2011, from 20 countries (Wong et al. 2012). In a survey in 1995, Severinghaus and Chi (1999) found that 6 % of the more than 68,000 prayer birds recorded for sale in Taiwan were alien species, but this had risen to more than 68 % of the 7634 birds recorded for sale in 2012 by Su et al. (2014). Taiwan also has a large number of alien bird species known from the wild: 90 species have been recorded at large there, of which at least 25 have been recorded breeding (see "Methods" section). More than 60 % of alien bird species found inthe wild are species known to have been traded in the Taiwanese pet market (Lee and Shieh 2005). We therefore predicted that the probability that an alien species is found in the wild in Taiwan is largely determined by the composition of the pet trade, and so depends on the same combination of societal demands and species availability that results in the mix of species in that trade (Su et al. 2015). We also predicted that availability determines the likelihood that an introduced species establishes a viable population, along with additional influences of the characteristics that relate to the likelihood that a species can cope with the Taiwanese environment.

From Ritual Releasing of Wild Animals Threatens Island Ecology Govindasamy Agoramoorthy, Minna J. Hsu. Human Ecology April 2007, Volume 35, Issue 2, pp 251-254 First online: 29 November 2006

Ninety-three percent of the total population in Taiwan, adhere to one of the two major traditional religions: Buddhism and Taoism, which stress the importance of good deeds during a person’s life and decree that releasing animals back to nature is one of the ways to garner good karma. In recent years, the large numbers of wildlife that have been released into Taiwan’s wilderness areas by Buddhist and Taoist believers have alarmed even animal rights organizations. People in Taiwan are estimated to spend about USD 6 million a year to set free 200 million wild animals for religious reasons, including insects, fishes, birds, reptiles, and mammals.

A total of 2,007 temples and religious institutions were surveyed and 483 (24.1%) of them provided animal releasing services, mainly in outdoor areas (Table I). Only four temples released animals within their premises (Table I). The Eastern part of Taiwan and other offshore islands released a lower percentage (13–18%) of animals compared to the rest of Taiwan (24–25%). Since there is a huge market for the ritual animal release trade, various species of birds, fishes, snakes, frogs, turtles, and even insects and monkeys are being captured from the wild by hunters or purchased from local pet markets to be released around the island’s rivers, mountains, forests, lakes, and reservoirs.

This practice of prayer release is so stupid and dangerous that I literally have nothing to say about it.

REF: American Buddhist Confederation 2012 statement on animal release.
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The Wang Choice

After all, the whole Barrayaran Vor system runs on nepotism. It's not a vice for us, it's a lifestyle.

Some hilarious moments from the Rational Party this week. The image above is from the Chu-Wang campaign website OneTaiwan, and this page shows the eduational background and experience of Vice Presidential Candidate Jennifer Wang, in the screen cap above. It shows (1) National Taiwan University Law Department (2) Fujen U Law Grad School (3) High school and (4) Jr high. What's missing? She has a PHD from Renmin U in China. LOL.

I clicked on the video page of the OneTaiwan site and images of gorgeous aboriginal people of both sexes pop right out.

My son LOLed when he rang up the Youtube site of the Chu campaign and observed that netizens were downvoting Chu at 10-1 rates over LIKEs in many vids. LOL.

Lots of fun stuff with Wang this week. Solidarity tweeted this gem -- you can't make this stuff up:

ジェームス ‏@jmstwn
Too good to be true: as of Sep. 2, Jennifer Wang's husband is chief of the Judicial Yuan Department of Government Ethics

Doling out high paying sinecures to connected insiders is just like living in government housing while using the savings from the cheap gov't rent to speculate in real estate. What this sort of thing shows is that for the mainlander elites who run the KMT, the government is basically the means by which the connected mainlander core extracts benefits from the population and transfers these to themselves. Wang is hardly alone... mainlanders are like 8% of the population but a third of the bureaucracy, and they dominate appointments to high position in the Ma Ying-jeou Administration.

...You might think it was stupid of Chu to pick someone like Wang with so many problems, but the at the top of the colonial class this pathology is a lifestyle and most are tainted by it, though they themselves see it as normal and not wrong. Almost anyone high level among Chu's own crowd that he picked would have been the same. Wang moved out of the dorms this week.

Don't click on that item above, it's an image. A new campaign video from the Chu-Wang campaign, a kind of complex pun in Chinese. It is a still image and lasts for 85 seconds... with no sound. You can find it on Facebook here. The first comment complains about the bright light on his forehead, and there were several humorous comments from viewers on other sites.

If you troll through videos on Chu's youtube website and the images of him on his campaign website, you'll soon see that in conditions where the KMT can't control the lighting, Chu is somewhat (not very much!) brown-skinned. Obviously this flaw must be covered! So in stills and campaign imagery, Chu's face is very brightly lit from one side. This whites out his brownish skin tone on one side, while shadowing it on the other. Nice.

The truth is that this is a boring election with the polls showing Tsai massively dominating week after week, and Chu slowly slipping and Soong fading, and me not much motivated to blog or write about it. The legislative elections are going to be much more interesting.

I am quoted in the Straits Times this week, on the xenophobic rant on the metro. Enjoy! At Laorencha Jenna was all over that...
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Daily Links and Stuff:

• Taiwan Braintrust Latest Newsletter is out!
• Two good ones from Thinking Taiwan: the US arms sale and the DPP, and the Spy Swap that Wasn't. 

Don't forget EATS 2016 Conference in Toronto
Taiwan Studies in Trans* Perspectives: Transdisciplinary, Transnational, and Transcultural
June 10-11, 2016
University of Toronto
Call For Paper(pdf)：https://goo.gl/dG4aMG
Call for paper website: http://www.na-tsa.org/new/2016/main-theme
Deadline of Abstract Submission: January, 08, 2016

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Links and Short Shorts

Who knows what weirdness you'll find on side roads. 

Busy, busy, busy...

• Months after the water park fire, the 15th victim dies. Amazing how the media has protected Presidential Candidate and New Taipei City Mayor Eric Chu on that one. DPP Candidate Tsai maintains her enormous lead. At below 20% in most polls, Chu is no improvement on Hung Hsiu-chu, the woman he replaced.
  
  It's interesting to look back on the polls from earlier in the year. For example, in April Chu was at 20% against Tsai at 26%, against a hypothetical Ko-Soong ticket. Fortunately that latter ticket never materialized. In May Chu was at 36% against Tsai in Apple Daily and 25% in Liberty Times. In June, at 23%. Once he did not come out, his own party faithful slowly lost faith in him and it's been that way ever since. Recall that there were cries he should step down when Hung was undergoing nomination, since he'd failed to provide the KMT with a viable candidate. What will happen when he is crushed and the KMT loses the legislature?
  
   In April Tsai was like 60-12 against Hung... Hung actually improved a bit once she became candidate. 
• South Korea our fastest growing tourism source. Looking forward to the day when I guide the Wonder Girls  and Girls Generation cycle ride round Taiwan...
• Frozen Garlic goes to a campaign event for Chiang Wan-an, great grandson of the dictator Chiang Kai-shek
• Froze comments on the low poll numbers for the KMT. I am so pessimistic, it is difficult for me to envision the state of the KMT collapse.
• "Foreign Surfers win all the titles at Taiwan Open of Surf". UPDATE: Open of Surfing, my mistake, English still awful. Nope, we don't resent foreigners winning or anything. And love the Chinglish name of the event *sigh* If only the government would consult several of the zillions of foreigners who live and work in Taiwan on such things.
• Prosecutors to appeal ruling in Tinghsin case. If the Appeals Court rules in favor of the prosecutors, then all the arguments that the judge was just ruling according to the evidence go *POOF*. But given who the defendants are, that isn't very likely. I expect the ruling will be upheld. Taiwan Times on the case is translated here says the judge didn't understand the law.
• Cole: The DPP did not mastermind Sino-skepticism. The KMT and China jointly succeeded at that.
• New Bloom: recent scandals and crony capitalism in Taiwan
• Deep Green Taiwan Think Tank says 64% of people say President should say Taiwan is not part of China. Plurality reject 1992 Consensus.
• Former President Lee Teng-hui, perhaps the greatest living Taiwanese, has a minor stroke and is hospitalized. Please stay with us til Jan 16, Dr. Lee.
• Wang Jin-pyng interview: public doesn't trust the legislature. Hey, who's been in charge of the legislature since forever? Oh yeah, Wang. 

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Blast From The Past: Taiwanese are Hardworking

A Japanese era pusher railroad.

From Robert Frank's Guadalcanal, a superb history of the Battle of Guadalcanal, discussing Japanese army deployments to the island (p, 253)...

The 17th Army petitioned Imperial Headquarters for reinforcements, including another infantry division, a tank regiment, and many artillery, supply, and communication units.<sup>1

1</sup>Incorporated in this list were several thousand laborers to porter supplies on Guadalcanal. The 17th Army specified it wanted only Taiwanese for this role, because, notes the Defense Agency history volume, it was a Japanese belief that the Taiwanese had the "strongest backs" among the subject peoples in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

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Deep anger at Ting Hsin Injustice

Another elaborate home for pigeons.

In retrospect it looks predictable and obvious: Ting Hsin got off in the toxic oil scandal. The China Post observes:

Former Ting Hsin Oil and Fat Industrial Co. Chairman Wei Ying-chung (魏應充), suspected to be behind a series of food safety scandals starting in 2013, was found not guilty yesterday in a ruling by the Changhua District Court due to lack of evidence.

Five others involved in the case, including a former CEO, a current chairman and the head of its Vietnamese food company subsidiary, were also found not guilty. Outraged civic groups holding signs outside the court described it as the darkest day in Taiwan food safety history.

Prosecutors, who had sought a 30-year sentence for Wei's role in the scandal, which involved tainted cooking oil, nutritional supplements, milk, rice and other food products, said that they intended to file an appeal.

Judges concluded that the measuring standard using acidity was not the most adequate means of determining the sanitary standards of cooking oil as refinement would cause acidity measurements to drop. The court indicated that according to its examinations, the polar compound level found in the samples was within safety limits for consumption.

Wei, who controlled three subsidiaries of the Ting Hsin International Group, was indicted for violating the Act Governing Food Safety and Sanitation (食品安全衛生管理法) in October 2014 after investigators suspected the group of allegedly selling cooking oil mixed with animal feed oil.

Note that the head of the Vietnamese subsidiary was found not guilty. It's super super super hard not to believe that everyone at the top of the firm knew what was going on, and certainly no one out there in the public believes that they were ignorant of the company's use of feed oil as food oil, but since at least some of the bad oil came from Vietnam, the man in charge of the Vietnam section had to know. The Taipei Times observed:

Yesterday’s ruling said prosecutors failed to prove that Ting Hsin Oil and Fat sourced fat extracted from unhealthy animals or that the company’s products were manufactured using unsanitary processes.

The defendants could not be proved to have committed the crimes they were charged with and are therefore not guilty, it said.

Naw. It's the usual case of the connected and powerful getting off. The Taiwan Law Blog said on Twitter:

@michaelturton @jmstwn Anger toward judge misguided. Existing laws suck, prosecution didn't do its job + facts may differ from media reports

Anger toward the judge is spot on, in my opinion. The final decision, obviously insane, rests with him. In fact the judge went out immediately to defend himself in the media since he knew perfectly well the decision was legally and morally indefensible.

Ting Hsin, run by the powerful Wei family (of Wei Chuan foods) is in thick with the KMT. Last time around this scandal provoked public anger at the then-ruling KMT. This time around there is deep deep anger: the public is fed up at the way the System protects the powerful, and most people I've contacted are convinced the judge was bought. I am not so sure -- the System so reflexively protects the powerful that this outcome seems inevitable. Originally I had assumed it would be a charade, though a slightly different one...

The Ting Hsin oil scandal is now hitting its prosecution phase, with prosecutors deciding to indict the owner of the hapless conglomerate with 30 years worth of charges. Some from the pan-Green camp in Taiwan are charging that the company made a deal with the Ma Administration to cover up its involvement in the oil scandal last year, from which it miraculously emerged unscathed. The owner of Cheng-yi, in the Ting Hsing group, was given charges worth a possible 18 years. No doubt they will go through the whole charade of a trial and sentencing and then flee to China like everyone else, where they will continue to run their multibillion dollar conglomerate. The Ting Hsin group was also forced to drop its attempt to become manager of Taipei 101 and banks withdrew loans for land acquisition.

I'd say someone got peeved at Ting Hsin over one of the many deals it was involved in and decided to unmask the firm, but it could just be bad luck. And just before the election too, voters were made aware that the Wei Family and the Lien clan whose scion Sean Lien is stumbling stumping for mayor in Taipei were buddy-buddy, a reminder of the you-scratch-my-back-I-give-you-lucrative-access nature of KMT rule. Also of interest in that scandal, an employee in the Pingtung County government faxed the document confirming that animal feed oil had been used to Ting Hsin "inadvertently", thus tipping the company off to the investigation.

I figured the courts would go through the whole ritual of finding them guilty and then they'd flee to China as is usually the case with KMT-connected individuals. But I was wrong -- the System produced a less troublesome verdict for them. If I were really really paranoid, I might conclude that giving the judge an excuse/opportunity for this verdict was the reason the Changhua prosecutors brought the case so hastily.

But however you interpret the verdict, the one fact in this train wreck is that the public is again going to blame the KMT for foisting this legally incompetent, ethically incomprehensible, and politically subservient judicial system on the nation, as well as for protecting Ting Hsin. Look for more punishment at the polls. TT described:

Netizens and civic groups reacted angrily to the ruling.

Saying the verdicts were vastly different from what the public expected, many netizens said that the nation’s judiciary was dead.

One netizen sarcastically said that he was glad to hear the ruling because it meant the oil he consumed over the past decade was safe and that he had not consumed tainted oil products for a decade or more.

This story actually broke in 2013, when the bad oil was connected to China. But that connection vanished. Ting Hsin's profits come largely from its China trade...

DPP Presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen had wisely been positioning the DPP as the party that cares about food security. This will likely pay off at election time.

But then the DPP will actually have to change the laws and overhaul the food system. Sure...

REF: Solidarity flipped me this video of Ma praising ECFA (in other words, himself) for bringing Ting Hsin back to Taiwan.

UPDATED: This image of the well-connected getting off is making the rounds.

The net is going to have a field day, and it will hurt the KMT.
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