Aussie boxer causes Aborigine stir | Radio Netherlands Worldwide - 澳大利亞原住民展開國旗

Aussie boxer causes Aborigine stir | Radio Netherlands Worldwide

Meanwhile in Australia, Aborigines do not identify with their "adopted" country. The solution would be to remove all flags from the Olympic Games from official ceremonies while letting spectators display their enthusiasm with the names of their athletes.

EDITORIAL: Let a thousand flags bloom - Taipei Times 倫敦奧運會 台灣國旗

EDITORIAL: Let a thousand flags bloom - Taipei Times

An excellent editorial of the issues and the history of a fla which in spite of a tormented past has become a symbol of Taiwanese identity if not nationhood. Let's be wary of flags however. Like everything it can be hijacked to promote repugnant ideologies.
In Taiwan's case it's just a right to refuse to be invisible as when Hou Hsia-Hsien won the Golden Lion for his film "A City of Sadness," and Taiwan's flag pole remained empty, (was it the first time that China pulled its muscles over the Taiwanese flag?).

I wonder whether someone has brought a Taiwanese flag to Qidong's protests.

紐約時報中文版新浪微博不存在 - New York Times Chinese-language edition's Weibo Account Closed down

A few hours after the Chinese-language edition of the New York Times went up, its Sina / Weibo was closed as reported by China Digital Times.

What would the Chinese government say if foreign governments "dared" to close access to the China Daily? The naive commentators who thought that with the Chinese Economy developing, democracy would improve, this is an eye opener. On the other hand, it could just be pressure from some government owned media who fear not the political contents of the New York Times but just the competition from a quality newspaper.
This is an interesting side of Chinese politics: using unwritten rules to stifle competition. It is also a very clear warning to foreign investors that they'd better have some reliable government connections to protect their business, otherwise they might find their investment falling into the wrong hands through no fault of their own.
The question then does arise: which foreign multinationals have reinforced the Chinese graft system? and aren't they laying out the trap into they will fall when Chinese companies steal their ideas and boot them out of China?

台灣敢廢除死刑嗎？Will Taiwan dare to abolish the Death Penalty?

The recent posthumous acquittal of Chiang Kuo-ching 江國慶, a soldier who was wrongly executed 14 years ago for the rape and murder of a young girl brings back the question of the death penalty in Taiwan.

 Executed soldier found innocent in posthumous trial
(click on cc icon for English subtitles) 

With Hong Kong as the only exception where the death penalty was abolished just a few years before its return to China, all other Asian countries have the death penalty on their statutes.

Taiwan often boasts of being a democracy with human values and respect for its citizens. Chiang's condemnation based on a forced confession by military intelligence officers show that some of them still suffer from a White Terror syndrome.
In many countries where the death penalty has been abolished, this was done against the wishes of the majority. Should Taiwan's politicians of all hues and creed have the courage to face up to their electorate and abolish the death penalty, they would send a message to other nations that would be hard to ignore. What better way would there be to send a message of independence to its neighbours?

In this respect, the European Union, a former nest of imperialism, has shown the way by imposing the removal of the death penalty as a condition for membership. Taiwan is one the Asian countries that has been most influenced by European culture and ideals, this without relinquishing its own soul and culture.
The recent enormous success of Seedig Bale where former colonists, the Japanese, and oppressed Aborigines are shown fighting each other without any room for concession is indicative of Taiwan's modernity. The director, Wei Te-Sheng's 魏德聖 made the decision to present fully the Seediq's merciless killing of Japanese women and children in the 1930 Wushe incident and show both the Japanese and the Seediq for what they really are: a part of our humanity, however imperfect.
Dignity is restored to the Seediq. Surely a Taiwan free of the ultimate punishment would be the logical continuity of this humanity.

Asia, along with a Taiwan's inspired leadership, must follow the EU's example. Reconciliation between former warring nations is necessary if the continent wants to be one of the centres for human development, not only economic but also spiritual. The death penalty's removal is a necessary part of the healing process in Asia. If former arch-enemies, such as France and Germany, have managed to become not only partners but friends, at all levels of society, Asian nations can also throw forever their past demons to the dustbin of history.
Could this be up for debate between Ma Jing-jeou 馬英九 and Tsai Ying-wen 蔡英文 before the next presidential election, could both agree to abolish the death penalty and turn this question into a non-issue?
It would help Taiwan to stand up proud among the chorus of nations.

溫州車事故，報紙抗命 Wenzhou Railcrash, no Let-up in Media and Public Outrage

Is this a watershed? Chinese Media fight Censorship Orders

RFI International Report 浙江溫州警方監視抗議者路透社7月27日照片

It could well be that this time public opinion won't be muzzled. In the past, Chinese authorities, local or central, have been able to muzzle opinion after ordinary citizens reacted to scandals, such as badly constructed schools resulting in children's deaths from earthquakes. This time, it's the relatively well off "upper middle class" that has been affected by the railroad disaster. Only relatively affluent Chinese can afford to take the high speed trains that are being built all over China. In the past this affluent class has been fairly uncritical of the regime since it had been reaping the benefits from the expansion of the economy.
Middle class affluent citizens have seldom been in the first line of revolts of fundamental changes in a country's political structure, unless they feel directly affected by events; as in the case of the railroad crash.
The fairly high sums paid to ten families are a proof of that concern. On the other hand many families are demanding higher financial compensation, claiming that, in a country with no social protection, the loss of someone has to be calculated against what that person represents in terms of "insurance" for retirement.

What is remarkable is not that the government has ordered the press to muzzle itself but that the orders have come out in the open in such details: Directives from the Ministry of Truth: Wenzhou High-speed Train Crash.

Unless the authorities move to ban half the words from Chinese dictionaries on Weibo, the Chinese twitter, it seems that this time, putting a few executives in jail and awarding huge sums of money to grieved relatives won't be enough to erase analysis of the lack of accountability embedded in the Chinese system of government.

It could well the tipping point towards fundamental changes in the way the Chinese view their government and how they should be governed or rather govern themselves. Responsibility rests not only with the Chinese government but Chinese citizens who have to overcome their own apathy or mistaken feeling of helplessness.

台灣開放中國客自由行 台灣柔術戰略 | Chinese Tourists Travelling to Taiwan: The Jujutsu Strategy

The number of Chinese tourists, nearly all of them on organized tours, visiting Taiwan has recently overtaken the figures for Japanese coming for vacation to the Island state. Individual Chinese visitors, allowed for the first time  (6月28日, 2011 | June 28, 2011), will certainly boost these figures to unprecedented heights. While keen to emphasize the fact that individual travel for Chinese citizens will boost the economy, the Taiwanese government and many tourist businesses do concede that there are other fringe benefits.

Winston F.C. Shen, chief executive officer of Hotel Royal Group, declared recently that "Taiwan can 'drive China to change' by welcoming independent tourists."  This is the reverse strategy employed by China on the world stage. China's economic clout has forced its government to deal with its newly found power. It has reluctantly realized that with power come new responsibilities that it cannot shirk anymore. Its recent reversal of attitude in some African countries, such as Libya and Sudan, shows that China can no longer pretend to have a neutral position on the excuse that it won't interfere in other nations' sovereignty.
Its relationship with Taiwan has undergone a major shift in the last two years. China has come to realize that brutal force and threat towards Taiwan, far from changing the opinion of Taiwan’s citizens, have in fact made them more hostile than ever towards China.

The Jujutsu Strategy

Taiwan, not being able to use the same force to advance its own interests, is using a Jujutsu strategy. As explained on Wikipedia: "Jujutsu" can be translated to mean "art" or "technique" and represents manipulating the opponent's force against himself rather than confronting it with one's own force.

Taiwanese governments and people, no matter what side or origin, have learned from their own history that they have to forge their own place as a small nation within Asia and be accepted on a different basis from China. China has based its growing strength and formidable economic power on the sheer energy coming from its huge population base. China's economic structure does not have to be an efficient one. Its continuous ability to be able to keep on drawing from a cheap home labour force, the Mingong 民工, has relieved it of the obligation to develop an efficient and organized economy akin to the German model. China has created the illusion of being a strong economy. It is, rather, a huge economy depending on cheap labour and whose expertise, for mass production, depends greatly on foreign knowledge. China is able to create high-end science and technology but it's not able yet, in spite of recent efforts, to produce this high technology in strength and depth. To continue expanding, incredibly enough for its own self-esteem, it depends on foreign powers: the most important one being Taiwan.

Taiwan is China's number one investor. When a recent fire broke out in one of Foxconn / Apple's iPad cases factories in China, it affected mainly share prices in Taiwan and the United States. Recent noises from China's generals that, contrary to US intelligence sources, they had practically no missiles pointed at Taiwan are prompted as much by the realization that China needs to appease Taiwan's public opinion before next year's presidential election as by a realistic assessment of Taiwan's importance to China's economy.Consequently, knowing that time works in its favour and that China is very much like a giant discovering its newly gained strength and clumsily trying to flex its muscles, Taiwan is finally giving an outlet to China’s untamed energy. Opening its borders to individual travel from China is a momentous historic change for the Taiwanese.

Already members of the Legislative Yuan are proposing to open its floor to Chinese tourists to let them see democracy, Chinese-language democracy, in action. As reported in the Sacramento Bee: "Taiwanese tour operators say many Chinese tourists - used to the propaganda programs on state TV - have asked to stay in their hotels to watch the freewheeling TV political talk shows on Taiwan."The Taiwanese government, KMT, DPP or otherwise, would be foolish to discard a certain paranoia towards China. No matter what type of government is in place in China, democratic, autocratic or dictatorial, China will always be a formidable and difficult neighbour. An island nation of 23 million lying an hour's flight from a country of more than 1.3 billion citizens is well advised to be wary of such untamed power.

The sheer numbers of Chinese who will come to visit Taiwan is Taiwan's biggest defence against China. The more individual tourists come to Taiwan, meet Taiwanese on their own mutual terms and engage in friendly discourse, the more Taiwan's independence, a word that yet remains to be defined, will become a fact. Taiwan will be able to send back to China its message: that Taiwan has turned into a peaceful and democratic country with all the usual imperfections found in other democracies in Europe and North America.
All these tourists will add to Taiwan's Jujutsu Strategy: Letting so many individual Chinese tourists in is a typical jujutsu manoeuvre. This will not be an invasion. These individual tourists, hopefully, will go home and be a force in China itself to convince their fellow citizens that Taiwan, although Chinese-speaking, has become something they should not try to assimilate but rather respect. The jujutsu move will have then fully come round.

One can only hope that Tsai Ying-wen 蔡英文 realizes that the Jujutsu strategy is not only Taiwan's best plan against China's threats but that it has been part of Taiwan's culture and history for the last 400 years, right from Taiwan's first constitutional government established by the Dutch for 30 years in the 17th century, through the Japanese occupation in 1895 up to the 21st century leading Taiwan into a new era of self-confidence (With the exception of February 28th, 1947 revolt 二二八 against KMT’s rule and injustice). The Taiwanese have since then switched to more subtle methods of resistance, if not more determined, against China's unprecedented challenge.
Taiwan's development and expansion into China's economy, its development of democracy, with its inevitable by-product of sanctioned corruption, and recent realization that a social revolution for more equality still is in progress augur well for the future.But, please, don't repeat this, the Jujutsu Strategy is Taiwan's secret weapon and once it has been used, as all jujutsu experts know, it will be too late for opponents to resist its force.

纪念六四 二十二周年 1989 - 2011 － 22 Years ago on this Day - June 4th

台港書籍、媒體漸進地進入中國 China Opens up slowly to Taiwanese Media and Publishing

Many Chinese Language Taiwanese Newspapers however are still blocked in China

For a few years many Taiwanese students have been buying books from China, in particular cheaper translations of foreign technical textbooks. What started as a cheaper option for students eager to save money has turned into a normal part of book selling in Taiwan. Indeed, mainstream Eslite bookstore chain among others has a dedicated floor in many of its recently opened branches, emphatically called "books in simplified characters." Of course all of these books come from China but most bookstores shy away from emphasizing the geographical nature of these publications. One has to remember that only two decades ago, any book from China was totally banned and that it would have been enough to be found in possession of a Chinese book to be arrested under martial law. In practice many innocent foreigners having brought dictionaries from Mainland China never encountered any problem.
Recently, in a similar "Alice in Wonderland through the mirror view," some Chinese bookstores have started stocking up on books from Taiwan and Hong Kong. Wangfujing Bookstore has a dedicated section of such books.

Wanfujing Bookstore: Promoting Books from Hong Kong and Taiwan

Considering that the "Law of the People's Republic of China on the Standard Spoken and Written Chinese Language (Order of the President No.37)" explicitly says in Chapter 1, article 1 that it "is enacted in accordance with the Constitution for the purpose of promoting the normalization and standardization of the standard spoken and written Chinese language" and that article 2 clearly states that normalization means the standardized characters (so-called simplified): "For purposes of this Law (...) the standardized Chinese characters." Articles 4 declares that authorities at various levels shall "take measures to popularize Putonghua and the standardized Chinese characters."
The Wangfujing bookstore being in the hands of Xinhua is, at least in spirit, breaching the law; not necessarily a bad thing. Naturally the selection of books, mainly from Taiwan, is still fairly limited. What is noticeable is that it is done with aplomb going to the point of producing promotion material. This has hardly been noticed in the Taiwanese media. a non-event.

Taiwanese Publishers in Force? (click on picture for larger resolution)

This comes at a time when Internet censorship on Chinese Language sites is intensifying. It is not clear what criteria are applied for blocking one site or another.
All English Language newspapers from Taiwan, including government sponsored sites, are freely accessible from Beijing; including the Taipei Times and the China Post. On the other hand many, but not all, Mandarin Chinese publications are blocked. Attempts to read the China Times 中國時報 or the Liberty Times 自由日報  are greeted with the notice that "the connection has been reset." At the same time on line papers such as Nownews did not provoke the ire of the censors. Many Wikipedia Chinese language pages could be accessed quite easily.

 There are dissenting views about whether there are two factions within the Chinese government, one being more liberal than the other. We can only speculate what brought about this timid liberalization on the printed word while more stringent controls are being enforced for electronic material.
In the meantime, many customers were clearly interested in the books being on offer.
One particular type of books was still missing: I could not see any travelling guide to Taiwan. Surely, with individual travel opening up for Beijing and Shanghai residents, this could have been a red-hot item.

艾未未失蹤：中共失面子 Ai Weiwei's missing: CCP Leaders Lose Face

China Internet observers have now taken to taking shots of articles on Chinese websites with the knowledge that articles routinely disappear. Ai Weiwei was arrested, disappeared for 48 hours before Chinese authorities reluctantly and indirectly admitted to his arrest.
They then proceeded to charge him with economic crimes. Maybe they thought that if they could not charge him with subversive arrests they could trump up charges that, so they thought, would be justified. They then could claim that he was a mere corrupt profiteer. The inventive charges must have come from watching too many Al Capone movies: if you can't prove Al Capone is a gangster, charge him with tax evasion. How naive! Ai Weiwei is not only innocent, but his activities and personality do not fit the crime.


AlJazeera: Chinese artist Ai held for 'economic crimes'

It's a new record: some faction of the Chinese leadership has managed to make two politically immature mistakes in only 72 hours.
First, they did not realize that the last person to arrest was Ai Weiwei. His disappearance brought immediate condemnation from many foreign governments, including the Taiwanese Mainland Affairs Commission and the DPP, albeit the MAC was a bit slow off the mark.
This brought into focus the spate of "disappearances" over the last two months. Many sites, which had published comprehensive lists, with location maps, of bloggers, journalists and writers who had been arrested and held incommunicado all over China as a probable knee jerk reaction to the Jasmine revolution in Tunisia, were linked to twitter messages. This has highlighted the increase in arrests since the revolution in Tunisia and the consequent paranoiac fear inside the Chinese government of similar events in China.
The second mistake was then to believe that economic charges would be believable and accepted at face value for his arrest.
It does appear that some soft-liners managed to convince the hard line faction that accusing Ai Weiwei would not stick and come out as a ridiculous and feeble attempt to smear an otherwise well considered and honest artist. They were right: unfortunately they did not stop to think that removing the articles would have a worse effect than leaving them untouched on web sites. Don't China's Internet Bamboo Wall know that Internet users know what to expect of Chinese authorities and are careful enough to take screen shots on a regular basis?
Some leaders are still in another time dimension and have a simplified view of the digital age. The electronic bamboo wall is increasing been torn down and all past activities can be recorded.
The Chinese leaders must have realized by now:  their primeval panic has brought upon them the worst punishment of all: they have made themselves lose face.
Possibly the most terrible thing that could happen to faceless bureaucrats; for they are bureaucrats not politicians, they have lost all sense of politics, good or bad.

艾未未48小時不見了 — Ai Weiwei has disappeared for 48 hours

Ai Weiwei holds some of his 100 million 'Sunflower Seeds'. Image from artlet-blog.com.

Ai Weiwei had disappeared for the last 48 hours after his arrest in full view in Beijing airport. The world media have been clamouring for his release along with many governments. Will they be listened? Fear of change often provokes political autism.
There obviously is a struggle between the hard liners in the Chinese Communist Party who have, too quickly, childishly even, pressed on the panic button and the softies who had been multiplying speeches on the necessity to look at concepts like democracy with optimism. Were these speeches just for international ears?
It appears that the hardliners are winning, for now. If change comes to China, it won't be in the same fashion as in Tunisia; but like Tunisia, it will be unexpected and from unforeseen quarters.
Repression hasn't managed to re-invent itself but dissent always finds new ways to come through. Similarly, the Great Internet Chinese Wall is becoming old and cracked. Many Chinese blog on twitter and even sign the petition asking for Ai Weiwei's release. If more and more Chinese manage to go through the cracks of the internet bamboo wall, it means that even China with its thousands of internet watchers will not be enough to stop popular demand for a new modern way to govern China.

Ai Weiwei! Where are you? Why is the Taiwanese government silent?*

*Ai Weiwei was due to work on an exhibition in the Taipei Fine Arts Museum.