Six Degrees of Desperation

The Blues fantasy that Chen Shui-bian staged his own assassination sustained them in defeat... and the China Post is still livin' the dream....

Police confirmed yesterday President Chen Shui-bian was wounded on March 19, 2004, by a bullet made at home by Tang Shou-yi, who is now claiming he was scapegoated in the investigation of the mystery-shrouded shooting in Tainan.

President Chen was reelected, thanks to the sympathy votes cast on the day following the incident, in which the gunman police identified later committed suicide and no smoking gun was found.

In a self-produced DVD confession sent from China, Tang charged police investigators framed him and Chen Yi-hsiung, the gunman who they said drowned himself "out of remorse" ten days after his "attempt to assassinate" the president.

The China Post, pro-KMT to the core, is playing coy: the DVD "sent from China" was not sent from just anywhere. Tang the bullet maker has gone to stay with Chang An-lo, one of Taiwan's most prominent gangsters. Tang is yet another example of a criminal in Taiwan, with strong gang connections, released on bail, and easily able to jump bail and leave the country -- to head (where else?) to China. The Post is downplaying the infinity of connections here between the pro-Blue side and Taiwan's underworld. Has Tang been coerced by the police, as he claims, or was his testimony bought and paid for by the Blues? You make the call....

Maddog reminded me in a private email that Chang An-lo is connected to Lin Chen-chieh, that gentleman who beat up a democracy supporter on TV -- and who showed up at Shih Ming-teh's anti-Chen protest and wanted to be his bodyguard (Lin is actually Chairman of Chang An-lo's political party). Wang Lan, who runs the female arm of the Bamboo Union gang, the Phoenix Corps, also volunteered to help bodyguard Shih Ming-teh. These gangsters are all pro-Blue -- Chang has ancient connections to Taiwan's martial law-era security services and was involved in the 1984 murder of writer Henry Liu -- just to keep the dizzying conections coming -- who was once a dinner pal of current PFP Chairman and KMT turncoat James Soong. Shih Ming-teh himself is connected to Chen Yu-hao, the notorious embezzler, who is apparently under the thumb of the Chinese government. Chang and his Bamboo Union gang pals all have China connections as well.

So, let me ask again. Did the police coerce Tang? Or did someone buy him? And who is pulling the strings?

[Taiwan]

Over at Taiwan Matters

Over at Taiwan Matters, where it is all Taiwan politics, all the time, Feiren is back from travels abroad and posting again, discussing the mayoral elections. Meanwhile Wulingren has posted on the elections. Oh, and me too! Sorry about the long hiatus there, but coincidentally several us had significant life events that all happened at the same time. But I expect that the blog will grow with plenty of quality posts. Looking forward to seeing your IP address there!

[Taiwan]

M-Shaped Taiwan Income

I've talked a couple times before about rising income inequality on the Beautiful Island. While politicians talk about economic growth, the population at large is experiencing stagnant, even falling, incomes, and greater appropriation of the national wealth to the nation's elites. ESWN today has a report from UDN on this pressing social issue:

According to the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics, Executive Yuan, over the past six years, the mean income of the 700,000 households with the lowest income just fell from NT$52,820 to NT$34,866 from year 2000 to year 2006. Thus, their mean current income is less than NT$3,000 per month.

Meanwhile the mean income of the 700,000 households with the highest income went from NT$1,621,747 to NT$1,741660 from year 2000 to year 2006. Thus, their mean current income is over NT$145,000 per month.

Meanwhile, the GDP is expected to grow by 4.14% per annum.

The M-shaped society is a reference to a society where the income curve has two peaks, one in the lower middle class, and one at the top, a trend noticeable in many industrial societies. Note that the DGBAS (stats page) data show that Taiwan's poorest households actually lost roughly 40% of their income since 2000.

A number of things contribute to this trend, including factories moving to China, but weak labor unions in Taiwan are a major problem for the working class, as Kerim at Keywords has pointed out. The implications for the island's politics of falling relative incomes in the middle and lower classes are obvious.

[Taiwan]

Sutter Slams Blues, Chen

Yesterday the Taipei Times reported that a prominent US Taiwan scholar had slammed the pan-Blues for their pro-China servility....and criticized Chen Shui-bian for "provoking" China.

US strategy in the East Asian region will be affected if the pan-blue camp continues to lean toward China and remains unwilling to show that Taiwan is determined to defend itself, a US academic said on Friday.

Robert Sutter, a visiting professor of Asian studies at Georgetown University, made the comments while attending a conference on East Asian Security and Taiwan held by the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University.

The article should probably have given more background on Sutter. He's not just any visiting professor, but is one of the most prominent US government scholars on Taiwan. Sutter has headed the non-partisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) desk on Taiwan, and also run the CIA Taiwan desk. He's been a professor at George Washington for many years. Sutter is well-respected, well-balanced, and extremely sensible.

He said that President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) had not taken advantage of the Bush administration's goodwill over the past six years and accused him of promoting provocative policies.

I'd say that the first half of this sentence is resoundingly correct, but the second more probably reflects a wish to be balanced rather than anything Chen has done. I'll discuss this in another blogpost elsewhere, but the short answer is that there is nothing that Chen can do to avoid being "provocative."

Regardless of whether the US will have a Democrat or Republican president after 2008, the administration will place China in the mainstream and a trend toward marginalizing Taiwan will become unavoidable, he said.

Former US Ambassador to China James Lilley, who also attended the event, said that Americans are realists and that the situation was not as bad as Sutter described it.

Lilley nonetheless added that the US was annoyed by Taiwan's unwillingness to defend itself while asking for US protection, and that the US and Taiwan should work together in examining how Taiwan could effectively defend itself.

Note that both men made it clear that the Legislature's foot-dragging on the arms sale is intolerable. I wish they'd put more effort into (1) giving Taiwan more co-manufacturing efforts in the project; and (2) reducing the price of the submarines.

Taiwan's representative to Washington David Lee (李大維), in his opening remarks at the conference, said that recent incidents, such as Chinese submarines violating Japanese territorial waters, together with China not having renounced the use of military force against Taiwan, show that China poses a threat not only to Taiwan, but also to East Asian regional security and stability in general.

Quite true. It's incredible that you can be thought statesmanlike for threatening to plunge the region into war whenever Taiwan exercises its democracy, but you can be provocative for closing a symbolic government organ with a US$30 annual budget. Clearly something is very, very wrong.

UPDATE: The PFP wants to get rid of Steve Young, the unofficial US rep to Taiwan.

[Taiwan] [US] [China] [Bush] [Chen Shui-bian] [Taiwan Relations Act (TRA)] [US Foreign Policy]

Bullet train to turn profit within 24 months.

Bigfoot exists, UFOs are alien transport vehicles, and the Taiwan Bullet Train will make a profit in its 2nd year.

Taiwan High Speed Rail Corp (THSRC), which has built Taiwan's first bullet train system and is still awaiting the final go-ahead to begin service, said that it expects operations to be profitable by its second year.

'We are targeting operational profits in the second year of commercial services,' company chief executive officer Ou Chin-der told XFN-Asia on the sidelines of a media gathering.

It expects to break even 12 months after its first commercial run.

Here's the plan:

He said each train has 989 seats, of which 66 are business class. The fare for each Taipei-Kaohsiung journey is 1,490 twd for economy class and 2,400 twd for business class.

'The plan is for 60 pct capacity during weekdays and 80 pct on weekends,' Chiang said.

Samuel Lin, company deputy chief operation officer, said the bullet train reaches speeds of 300 km per hour.

Among the THSRC's operational targets is passenger volume of 150,000 passengers per day, representing a 70 pct load factor. It will provide services to Taiwan's western transport corridor, where 94 pct of the island's 23 mln people live.

The government is going to try to assure profitability by shutting down several express trains on the ordinary lines, forcing customers to the bullet trains. I suspect this is because, as many will find out, a passenger on the bullet trains is going to take about the same amount of time to get from point A to point B as he would have on the ordinary train. Most of Taiwan's train stations are centrally located and accessible from anywhere in the city. The bullet train stations, by contrast, are in areas far from the city center. The real justification for the bullet train lies here:

An official quoted estimates from the Council of Economic Planning and Development that construction of the high-speed rail network has created 480,000 jobs and may contribute 1 percentage point to economic growth.

Well, it's true that if you spend tons of money on public construction, an economic stimulus will result. But once the construction is over, those jobs will melt away. Essentially Taiwan is on the same construction-industrial state treadmill that Japan was, with large infrastructure projects driving local politics and reorienting local businesses on construction, in turn requiring further provision of infrastructure to keep the System going.

Michael Klein sent me some pictures of the inside of the train. It's quite attractive, and the business class seats all have built-in electric plugs so that you can plug in your laptop, camera, etc. Cool.

[Taiwan]

Shelly Rigger Lecture

Mark at the excellent blog Pinyin Info sent me this link to a lecture by Shelly Rigger in October to high school history teachers: "What Every American Needs to Know about Taiwan" to the Foreign Policy Research Institute for the conference: "Understanding China: A History Institute for Teachers."

There's some highly problematic claims in here, which I'll be commenting on when I have more time.

http://www.fpri.org/education/china/

[Taiwan]

Cache, Crash, and Grass: Nobody Slides for Free

Hsinchu is my nemesis: every time I visit the Windy City, something happens.

The day started out normally. My friend Michael Klein, the Bushman, invited me up to Hsinchu to hunt for a geocache out by Yung-An Fish Port. Geocaches are like easter eggs, hidden in the landscape by GPS hounds, for other GPS enthusiasts to find.

The national sport is fishing. Here a local fishes for tilapia, a delicious farmed fish that has been dumped in ponds and creeks, and is now wild.

Michael points out to us where the fish are.

A nice clean habitat for the fish.

The fish.

I took lots of pics of the countryside -- it was a windy day, with flat light.

Rural towns.

An ornate old temple beckons.

Another temple. I love the incense burners.

Where is the geocache? Michael considers.

Down this trail?

Here we are! Geocache found.

Michael and Huichen unpack the geocachen.

Lots of cheap trinkets, to which the finder is supposed to add.

The travel bug....you can remove it and place it in another cache, so that it moves around the world. It is identifiable by a unique serial number.

Michael returns it to its hiding place.

After we found the cache, we went driving along the beach.

Here we view Yung An Fish Market from the north.

A cold day, the wind whipping up waves along the beach...

Michael and I are both wind power enthusiasts, so we decided to go take a look at the wind machines nearby.

Here two of them tower over the local homesteads. We drove into a dead end road by a rice field. So I decided to back up...

...Oops! I backed right into the field. The car slid slowly off the road, a shocking intrusion of anarchy into the well-controlled driving life I've made for myself. Amazing. In the passenger seat Michael yelled at Huichen in the back, but she was OK. Incredibly, none of us were injured, I told Michael I was OK...but more out of incredulity that I was OK, then out of any need to inform him. How could we fall into a field and not be injured? I clambered out over Michael, then opened the back so that Huichen and Michael could get out. They gingerly walked out on my side windows, so as not to break them. A positive sign: even though we were lying on our side the engine was still running. I turned it off after Michael reminded me, since he was afraid that it might cause a fire.

The car lies forlornly in the field.

The tow truck was an hour away, so we walked out to the main road and grabbed some lunch.

Michael was a rock. Everything will be OK. Just you watch, he said. You'll drive this vehicle right out of here. Reassuring, patient, and kind, Michael made my day. Huichen too did yeoman work talking to the tow truck guy and making sure he found the place, which was waaaay out in the middle of nowhere.

Wait! I've got to get some stuff...!

After an hour the tow truck came. Hmmm.....how do I solve this problem...

This guy was amazing. He was so good, so careful, he could write the Gospel of Mark on a postage stamp with his winch and crane. Tenderly and lovingly he winched the car out of the field.

Incredibly, it was back on the road. It started right up. The only problem was that it was out of oil, all of which had leaked out.

He gave me a free tow to the service station, where I bought some oil.

And drove away....

And so we went back to Hukou to BBQ and got drunk. The tow guy was amazing, made sure everything went well, polite, patient, and highly skilled, the very essence of professional service. He was incredible. I gave him a bottle of rum as a tip. And let's face it, as Michael pointed out, any day that you end up uninjured and inebriated is a very good day....

UPDATE: Car still works fine after one day. Michael K. has some great pics, taken by Huichen as the car was moved.

UPDATE: The person whose travel bug was in the geocache blogged us here.

UPDATE: What's long and thin and lives in my car? The snake the repair guys found in it on Monday morning.

[Taiwan]