Since everybody has been talking about Google’s classification of Taiwan, it’s kind of fun to see how the CIA World Factbook contorts a little bit to list them properly.
Yes, under their dropdown menu of “Select country or region,” Taiwan gets the odd distinction of being placed at the end of the other-wise alphabetized list, along with the European Union.
Is this the fate of all political parties when they hold power for any length of time?
Oct 6, 2005 Taipei Times Editorial
After almost six years in power, the performance of the DPP administration has disappointed a number of pan-green diehards, with some gloomily wondering whether the DPP is losing its ideals and ability to improve itself. It has also alienated a large segment of the party’s grassroots supporters, the very people who had helped to elect the then 14-year-old DPP in 2000.
Some supporters are beginning to wonder whether the DPP has turned into the equivalent of the old Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regime it used to fight against — a corrupt party leading a corrupt government. This kind of sentiment was especially prominent in the wake of the recent spate of scandals plaguing the DPP administration — one of them being Kaohsiung’s problematic MRT project. An Aug. 21 riot, ignited by Thai laborers protesting against their poor living conditions, unexpectedly brought to light a complex influence-peddling scheme in which ranking government officials apparently exploited Thai workers while pocketing money from the project’s construction funds.
January 9 2005 Washington Post article:
Democrats and some Republicans, troubled by the moves, cite parallels between today’s Republicans and the Democrats who lost their 40-year hold on the House in 1994 after Gingrich and other conservatives campaigned against them as autocratic and corrupt, and gained 52 seats.
“It took Democrats 40 years to get as arrogant as we have become in 10,” one Republican leadership aide said.
Julian E. Zelizer, a Boston University history professor who edited the 2004 anthology “The American Congress,” said Republicans used the past week to “accelerate the trend toward strong, centralized parties.”
“This is a move toward empowering the leadership even beyond what you saw in the 1970s and 1980s,” Zelizer said. “They have been going for broke.”
Now you know why I registered to vote as an independent.
Shelton Bumgarner at the Marmot’s Hole blog quotes from a recent NYT article about how Disneyland Hong Kong has been redesigned to accomodate Chinese culture’s lack of waiting online.
There are, in fact, cultural differences in how people behave while in line, according to social scientists and park designers. Those differences have even led to physical changes in so-called queuing areas at some parks.
Rongrong Zhou, an assistant professor of marketing at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, said the differences went beyond a Hong Kong-mainland split. Ms. Zhou, who has studied the psychology of queuing in Hong Kong, although not at theme parks, said there was a tendency among Asians and others in more collective cultures to compare their situation with those around them. This may make it more likely that they will remain in a line even if it is excessively long.
(The NYT article is old enough to only be avaliable to Times Select subscribers, which I am not, hence no link.)
When I was traveling in China, my fellow backpacker stumbled across a book, written in English by a Chinese man for a presumably Chinese audience, entitled something like “An introduction to English culture.” This book contained a sentence, now forever emblazoned across my mind, that almost perfectly defined the experience of being a foreigner in China, and perhaps of being a Chinese abroad.
“In England there is a phenomenon known as queueing.”
What more needs to be said?
Shelton also notes that Koreans seem to have no trouble with waiting on line. I can attest that the same is true of Taiwan, one of the many cultural differences between this island state and its parent continental nation. Perhaps waiting on line is, like removing ones shoes when entering a private home, a habit picked up from the Japanese during the 50 year rule?
If a country elects their legislature through free and fair elections, but they spend their sessions physically fighting each other and don’t actually pass any bills, is the country still a democracy?
Photograph and caption from the Taipei Times:
DPP Legislator Wang Shu-hui, left, attacks KMT Legislator Kuo Su-chun, right, after Kuo tore up a copy of Premier Frank Hsieh’s policy report that he was scheduled to deliver yesterday at the opening of a new sitting of the legislature.
Oh, and please, please don’t refer to Taiwanese politics as ‘kabuki.’
The cartoon figure of President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) has finally been granted permission to appear in the exhibition to celebrate the upcoming Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Busan, South Korea, thanks to the efforts of officials from the Taipei Mission in South Korea and the Busan Cartoon Club.
The cartoon figure of Chen was put on display yesterday at the APEC Summit Cartoon Figure Exhibition in Busan City — the venue of this year’s annual event — along with those of other heads of state slated to attend the APEC summit in November.
Unlike Japan, Taiwan politics lags in maturity
2005-08-25 / Taiwan News /
Taiwan’s politicians and political parties should pay closer attention to major and interesting changes taking place in the Japanese political system.
Earlier this month, the upper house of the Japanese Diet vetoed the postal service privatization plan of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.
Koizumi took this action as a sign of “no confidence” of the reform program of his right-wing Liberal Democratic Party-New Komeito Party government and decided to dissolve the current Diet and call for general elections, which will take place on September 11.
The poll will mark the first time that a general election to elect a new lower house will have been called by a prime minister in the wake of a defeat by a proposed bill by the House of Councilors.
Moreover, thanks to another division in the ruling LDP triggered by the controversy over the postal service privatization scheme, it is by no means certain that the LDP will be able to maintain a majority in the September 11 election, with or without the assistance of New Komeito.
During the years of Koizumi’s premiership, the trend in Japanese politics to “oppose factional bosses and oppose bureaucrats” has become increasingly evident.
In other words, the fading away of the traditional central concepts of “interests and connections” in policy debates has now become a mainstream trend in Japanese parliamentary politics.
Contemporary Japan is no longer a polity dominated by sterile “opposition for the sake of opposition,” but is now increasingly characterized by a growing focus on national interest as the main determination in political tendencies and orientations.
Japanese politics can thus be said to be progressively becoming more mature.
Moreover, in contrast to the previous focus on personal ties over political positions, the new trend is for politicians with sharply different advocations and stands to cease cohabitation in the same political party.
‘Political responsibility’
Therefore, Koizumi has refused to re-nominate LDP Diet members who opposed his postal privatization bills and even, in emergency Cabinet meetings, sacked ministers who openly objected to the dissolution of the Diet.
In addition, a former Diet speaker and four other LDP heavyweights who voted against the postal privatization bills submitted their resignations from the ruling party on the same day of the crucial Diet vote and commonly decided to form a new “People’s New Party.”
In our view, such actions reflect a proper sense of “political responsibility.”
Nevertheless, while Taiwan has experienced over a decade of democratic parliamentary politics (counting from the holding of the first genuine Legislative Yuan election here in December 1992), the dominant value systems in substance of most politicians remain personal or partisan interests.
Unfortunately, not only are the actions of politicians swayed mainly by personal interests or partisan considerations, but so is the behavior of many if not most voters.
As a result, the main determinant of voting behavior is not a party’s or politician’s political vision or policy appeal, but rather following the lead of “ward bosses” or factional chiefs and the pursuit of narrow and highly partisan definitions of “welfare.”
Politicians with sharply different views or even divergent notions of national identity are regularly nominated by the same political party and, in turn, they frequently work to undermine the political bases of their “party comrades” in order to advance their own personal or factional interests or to seize political power.
Real motives
Certainly, Taiwan has already reached the stage in which “the counting of heads has replaced the cutting of heads” as the main means to decide political power, but we must seriously ask ourselves whether our current political ecology can truly be described as a “democratic society.”
Politics absolutely should not be divorced from the people. However, the advocations and judgments of the people are rarely visible in the daily operations of Taiwan’s political party system.
Instead, the bulk of the news media and politicians are feverishly occupied with trying to deceive the people or keep them in the dark about the real motives and issues at stake in our political life through activities that smack more of fundamentalist revival meetings than rational or substantive political discussion or discourse.
As a result, Taiwan society remains deeply ideologically divided between dogmatic “blue” or “green” quasi-religions that mask the nature of the real interests, problems and questions that our citizenry must decide.
In this state of affairs, politicians are either using the media or being manipulated by the media. In any case, what neither the bulk of the media nor most politicians are inclined or able to realize is substantive policy discussions on issues.
Politics is Taiwan is mostly for show and fails, no matter how extremely views may be offered, to be “radical” in the sense of dealing with fundamental matters.
We hope that factional politics and dogmatic ideological strife can “wither away” from Taiwan political life, along with related maladies such as quasi-religious mobilization, vote buying and “voting for the winner.”
We hope Taiwan’s political parties will begin to display the signs of maturity that are now surfacing among Japanese politicians and shift the focus of debate and decision to what is in the best interest of our society and our people so that genuine democracy can finally emerge in Taiwan.
I just posted this very brief introduction to porcine sacrifice in Taiwanese religion so I could post my own photos and people would know what they were actually looking at. Here’s a flickr set of photos I took yesterday during the setup and middle of a ceremony at a small neighborhood temple.
<Update: October 5, 2010 >I just noticed a surge of visitors to this post, so I thought I’d add a link to a Flickr photo set I took of the god pig sacrifice at a small temple next to the apartment where I was living in Taipei at the time.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mutantfrog/sets/817964/
Doesn’t that sound like the title of a pulp story or B movie?
The Ghost Month is nearing it’s end here in Taiwan, and all through the past few weeks festivals and offerings have been visible in temples and shrines and in front of homes and businesses throughout Taipei. While most people reading this may know that Chinese religion involves the offering of food, drink, and burned fake paper money (which looks nothing like real money) to ancestor and god spirits, the continues existence of ritual animal sacrifice may surprise some.
Danny Bloom had a short post on Japundit about two weeks ago, the day after I saw my first pig offering at a small corner temple I pass everyday on the way to class.
Taiwan’s Hakka ethnic group holds an annual festival during the seventh lunar month, where a unique custom of sacrificing “spirit pigs,” which are traditionally grown to a huge size — and we mean HUGE — before being slaughtered.
However, in keeping with the principles of the ethical treatment of animals, today’s ceremonies often use likenesses of pigs instead of the real thing.
In this photo from the Taipei Times, a sculpture of a ‘divine pig’ can be seen outside Taipei City Hall, where the annual Taipei Hakka Memorial Ceremony was taking place recently.
Oink!
The August 13th Taipei Times had a rather hilarious photo of a pig stand-in made out of fruits.
They also have two interesting articles about the tradition of pig sacrifice in Taiwan.
Sacrificial swine prompt backlash
The belief that “the bigger the sacrificed pig, the more luck a person will have for the rest of the year” has resulted in a lifetime of agony for hundreds of pigs, bred by farmers to become abnormally overweight before slaughter, animal-rights activists said yesterday.
Dozens of activists from several animal-rights groups yesterday gathered in front of the Council of Agriculture (COA) to protest traditional pig contests, saying the government has failed to regulate abusive practices toward animals.Showing a documentary about pigs selected for the contest, activists said that 15 to 18 months before the overweight pigs are killed as sacrificial offerings, they are deprived of fluids, exercise and even turning over freely. The pigs undergo these cruel farming practices until their weight reaches upwards of five to six times their normal weight, activists said.
The accompanying photo truly must be seen to be believed. Yes, those are the pig’s ears at the bottom.
Three days ago the same publication had a good article giving a roundup of various traditions of the Ghost Festival. Of interst here is the final anecdote, concerning a rural pig farmer who raises animals for sacrifice, which gives a much more accepting description of the practice than the earlier story focusing on animal rights protesters.
About 10km away from the Yonglian Temple, a different type of religious tradition is taking place. The Ghost Festival had attracted about a dozen pig farmers carrying truckloads of sacrificial pigs to the Tachong Temple in Pali (八里) Township, Taipei County, one of three local temples taking turns to host the annual event.
The 210-year-old Tachong Temple has just been designated as having historically significant architecture, and temple managers hope to begin a renovation project by the end of next month to give the building a face-lift.
Chou Chin-tiao (周金條) won this year’s pig-raising contest with an animal that weighed 890kg. The first runner-up came in far behind, at under 500kg, with the second runner-up weighing about 400kg.
This was the fifth time Chou won the contest. The secret of growing such a big pig, Chou said, lies in the fodder. The feed he uses contains grain shells, rice porridge, canned fish, pig oil, milk powder and raw oysters.
The animal is fed twice a day, with 14kg of fodder each meal, and is given water every three hours. The cost for the fodder alone is about NT$30,000 a month.
During the summer, he has seven fans blowing on the animal to keep it cool and comfortable.
During his some 30 years of pig farming, Chou said that only three pigs died under his care. Although he spends more time and effort taking care of the animals than his wife and four children, Chou said that it pays off when he wins the highest honor.
“I don’t raise the pigs for the gold plate or certificate of merit,” he said. “I do it to fulfill a promise I made to the Buddha when I was poor that I would offer big sacrifices if I could have food to eat and clothes to wear.”
An amusing article in the Taipei Times:
Premier Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) said yesterday that the term Taike (台客) should be an adjective for young Taiwanese men who possess clear and logical thinking, and who speak eloquently.
“When the noun and adjective Taike is used, usually people are calling or describing somebody who is not elegant or has bad taste in clothes and no sense of style, perhaps even in the way they talk. I hope that we can turn this upside down and make it all around,” Hsieh said.
[…]
Taike is a recent popular noun and adjective which media often have used to describe somebody who gives the impression of having bad taste in many respects, such as the way they dress, their speech and behavior.Originally, Taike was first used in 1990 in Taiwan among teenaers, but the term did not become widespread until recent years.
Stereotypical Taike dye their hair different colors, wear colorful shirts and baggy pants all the time irrespective of the occasion, talk a lot, drink too much, curse constantly, chew betel nut and speaks Mandarin with a heavy Taiwanese accent.
I first heard this term when I went on a trip to Penghu a few weeks ago with a group of Taiwanese when a couple of the girls were using it to tease one of the guys on the trip. Interestingly, despite what the article says, I only heard the term ‘tai,’ not the longer ‘taike.’ Still, the description in the article fits what I heard. According to the girls I was with, there are two basic types of ‘tai.’
First is the type who just doesn’t know/care how to dress or act: flip flops, a sloppy and vaguely bow-legged way of walking, exercise shorts, probably a betel-nut chewer. Second: the kind who thinks they know how to dress, but is tragically and comically mistaken. There may not be any exact equivalent in America, but perhaps if you meditate a little on terms like ‘redneck‘ or ‘guido‘ you may begin to get at least a kind of relativistic sense of what’s going on.
Does anyone out there have any good examples, either in words or photos?
Following my post yesterday about the Dalai Lama’s upcoming visit to my former university of Rutgers, I thought this very recent Time Asia article describing his government in exile.
Around me, matrons from Lhasa are buying bread from vendors outside the temple, and walking their children to the Tibetan school down Temple Road. Recent escapees from Tibet are setting up tables and preparing lattes and chocolate cakes at the sleek Moonpeak Café and at Chonor House, the elegant guesthouse run by Tibet’s government-in-exile. Everywhere are monks in red, reciting sutras, sweeping their temple grounds, streaming into Internet cafés, and just whiling away their day in the shadow of Himalayan foothills, almost as if they were at home. What I’m seeing, improbably, is a vision of Tibet that you can never see these days in Tibet itself.
Also see a brief post I did earlier about Tibetans in Taiwan.
