Jason of wandering to Tamshui offers a rare note of approval for a visiting foreign correspondent on his assessment of the mood of Taiwan residents toward the Mainland.:

Larry Johnson, a columnist covering Asia-Pacific Issues for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has returned from a two-month trip to Taiwan with some information that has been long-known to some but little-known to many: most young Taiwanese are either apathetic to China or support continuing a separate existence from their long-lost brothers across the strait.

Among his findings after speaking to young students around Taiwan:

"The younger generations will decide Taiwan’s future. And that decision will be of great concern to a United States that is obligated by treaty to provide for the defense of Taiwan. What are the attitudes of Taiwan’s young people toward reunification and mainland China?

To answer that question, I recently spent two months traveling throughout Taiwan, talking with young people from 13 to 30. Their answers, overall, show an attitude in stark contrast to the conciliatory attitude of Taiwan’s top political parties and suggest a much more forceful stand for independence, one that would bring Taiwan into sharp conflict with China.

I did formal interviews with 50 people, from Taipei, the modern capital in the north, to Tainan, the ancient capital in the south. My subjects, for the most part, were high school and university students but also included young workers and business people. The interviews were in English, which is widely spoken, and even when language was somewhat a barrier, many of the young people were still eager to express their views.

Of the 50 people, only six said they would like Taiwan to become part of mainland China."

First of all, kudos to Johnson for taking the time to interview people from all over Taiwan, not just Taipei, which skews blue. Most foreign journalists are either too lazy or too ignorant of the rest of the country to even bother asking themselves whether the other 90% feel the same way as a pampered university student with family business interests in China.

Technorati Tags: asia, china, east asia, northeast asia, taiwan

Madman of Chu responds to Michael Turton’s counter-argument on the prospects of the Taiwanization of China.:

China’s only hope of avoiding cataclysmic meltdown is to opt for an eventual program of decentralization. All of the provinces of China must ultimately enjoy a great deal of autonomy and independence from Beijing- even more autonomy than the 50 states of the U.S. do from Washington, as each province is geographically, socially, and demographically more complex than even the largest U.S. state. As this process of decentralization occurs (assuming for the moment that the best-case scenario arrives), the question of the non-provincial territory of the PRC (the so-called “autonomous regions”) will naturally come into play.

Beijing is no more likely to ever grant Tibet, Inner Mongolia, or Xinjiang total independence than it is to Taiwan. Even so, it is not inconceivable that a reformed Chinese government might accede to a “bimodal” polity. In this scheme the 22 historical provinces of China would be fully integrated into a Chinese Federation. The autonomous regions of Xinjiang, Tibet, and Inner Mongolia (Ningxia and Guangxi too, should they so desire) would be bound more loosely into a Greater Chinese Commonwealth. Commonwealth members would have many of the powers of sovereignty (thus the Dalai Lama could return to Tibet, Xinjiang could resolve its own policy toward Uighur language and Islam, etc.), they would only defer to Beijing on matters of foreign policy and defense.

If Taiwan were to join such a system as a Commonwealth member it could retain its own institutions and sovereign independence, and would benefit from the lowering of all logistical impediments to cross-Strait trade. This might seem like an impossibly optimistic scenario, but international trends such as that exemplified by the EU demonstrate that it is the downhill slope of history. A Greater Chinese Commonwealth is no more intrinsically unlikely than a European Union, it only seems so because where Europe had historically been artificially hyper-fragmented China has been artificially hyper-united. If despite centuries of destruction and hardship Europeans have finally moved toward a more rational reconciliation of disparate sovereignties, it is not too much to hope that China, whose suffering has been no less intense, might make an analogously rational move (albeit in, superficially at least, the opposite direction).

Technorati Tags: asia, china, east asia, northeast asia, taiwan

AsiaPundit loves Google Earth. As noted here earlier, the Spy Satellite for the Masses has brought us pictures of places that were usually off limits, such as Pyongyang, Beijing’s Zhongnanhai party compound and South korean presidential compound Cheong Wa Dae.

Now, a Filipino blogger uses the tool to expose what is possibly illegal logging in Laos:

I’ve been using Google Earth to get an idea about some of the landscapes in rice growing regions for a project I’m working on and I came across what appear to be cleared areas in Northern Laos.

These bare patches seem to be limited to the area roughly bounded by the red circle in the inset image. There aren’t any obvious sites like these in the highlands in neighboring Vietnam.

If you look carefully you can even see that there are light green patches on the landscape that I assume are cleared areas that are regrowing, indicating that the process has been going on for at least a few years.

If you know anything about land use in this region, I’d be curious to hear from you about it. (Blog commenting is off for a while due to excessive spamming…)

Technorati Tags: asia, east asia, philippines, laos, southeast asia

A young journalist in China explains clearly, on his must-read blog, why central government authorities as well as Jilin and Harbin authorities must take responsibility for the disaster along the Songhua river.:

Now that everybody’s jumping in on the benzene spill incident, it seems there’s hardly any aspect of the story that hasn’t been covered by domestic or foreign media — from the Fascist rule of the CNPC subsidiary’s chief manager, Yu Li, to the old man shuddering in the howl of Harbin’s cold wind waiting in a long line to get rationed water, to the unsuspecting Heilongjiang fishermen who kept on catching and eating fish from the Songhua while the toxic stretch of water slowly passed their domain. Now everybody knows there was a shameful cover-up.

A friend who works at Jilin city’s drinking water corporation told me that they started testing water samples in the Songhua the night of the explosions. Although they mostly sampled water near their intake points, there’s reason to believe that they knew some pollution probably was created. I also got on the phone with water-quality supervision officials from the provincial capital of Changchun, who said that they were stationed in Songyuan (downstream of Jilin city, near the border of the two provinces) to monitor river water contamination levels 24 hours a day between Nov. 15 (two days after the explosion) and Nov. 24. On Nov. 16, they found the water with benzene levels over 60 times the national standard. It peaked on Nov. 17, when benzene reached more than 300 times above national standard. Hell, they knew it from the very beginning.

But according to Heilongjiang officials, their bretheren in Jilin didn’t notify them of the contamination until Nov. 18. The truth may be even more shocking. My colleague who went to Harbin learned that Jilin authorities probably never sounded the alarm to Heilongjiang — the latter only knew about the toxins in the river on Nov. 19, when their own water-quality monitoring outposts tested alarmingly high levels of benzene near Zhaoyuan.

…

Despite what some people may think, the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) didn’t play an honorable role either, at least not initially. They also knew about the spill from the very beginning. SEPA sent officials down to Jilin on Nov. 13, and they later claimed they tested and found benzene in Jilin waters on that day. In theory they should have access to all statistics from both provinces all along, and we confirmed this partially. Again, they chose to remain silent until Nov. 23. Presumably the central government agency waited out the finger-pointing and political bantering between the two provinces, and then jumped in at the perfect moment to play God.

Technorati Tags: asia, censorship, china, corruption, east asia, harbin, northeast asia

Via the Peking Duck, In These Times offers a relatively good summary of the stranglehold that China’s Communist Party keeps on freedom of expression and the free flow of information:

The Ministry of Public Security has also announced plans to roll out a software program developed by Venus Information Technology, a local company, that will monitor cell phone text messages. Plans to create a network of 100 satellites capable of monitoring every inch of Chinese territory by 2020 are also in place. In addition to monitoring the environment and urban growth, the network would monitor “various activities of society,” Shao Liqin, an official in the ministry of science and technology, recently said.

China is also “more successful than any other country” in censoring the Web, according to a recent report by Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

More than 250,000 Web sites—including those of major Western media and non-governmental organizations—cannot be accessed. An estimated 30,000 human monitors scan e-mail, Google searches, and chat sites such as MSN and Yahoo, and troll online groups and blogs to find offending information. Individuals identified for “seditious” online activity are often arrested, as was the case with Zhang Shengqi, a 23-year-old student arrested for publicly supporting the Roman Catholic Church, which is banned in China.

Technorati Tags: asia, censorship, china, east asia, northeast asia

Lonnie at One Man Bandwith is considering setting up a charity to support cancer treatment among those who cannot afford it. In China, as he notes, a lack of funds equals death.

The Chinese State media recently reported that a poor (still known as “peasant” here) woman debilitated by a stroke was dropped off at a crematorium, still alive, by her family who had run out of money for her hospitalization. Three days of the woman’s treatment had exhausted their life savings.

She was saved only when the mortician noticed tears coming from her eyes as he prepared her. Later, residents of the area collected money for further treatment.

According to a local official in her area: “The fundamental reason is the absence of a social welfare system.”

China’s Vice Minister of Health estimates that half of all farmers cannot afford medical treatment when sick. In the 70’s, more than 90% of China’s rural population was covered by cooperative medical programs. Those programs ended with the introduction of market reforms.

Another farmer who could not pay for his lung cancer treatment blew up himself, killed another passenger on a bus and wounded some thirty others with a homemade bomb.

And a security guard who had once been hailed a hero in his town jumped to his death while still in the hospital because he knew he would not be able to afford the bills.

The Unsinkable Ms. Yue, the subject of the cancer journals in this blog, is staring down the barrel of the same dilemma: her treatment has already cost the equivalent of 10 year’s of salary in China. Her upcoming chemo’ bills, with the only drug known to be effective in her kind of cancer, will cost another 40 years salary equivalent. If the money is not found, she will not receive treatment. It is simple: pay or die.

Given that peasants were drinking benzene-polluted water for 10 days, there will probably be a few more cases of Chinese who will not be able to afford payment.

Technorati Tags: asia, china, east asia, northeast asia

The Bruce Lee statue unveiled in the Bosnian city of Mostar as a way to promote peace between Muslims and Croats has been vandalized.:

He used to conquer rooms full of bad guys without breaking sweat - but now the mighty Bruce Lee has been mugged by petty vandals.

A life-size brass statue honouring the martial arts legend in Bosnia had its nunchucks swiped just hours after it was unveiled.

The chain and sticks were reportedly taken from the kung fu equipment and empty wine bottles were left scattered around the park where the statue sits.

Nightkeeper Veljo Dojcinovic said he saw a group of teenage hooligans entering the park in the middle of the night.

“I heard a loud bang but I was alone and I couldn’t stop them. Police should have been more agile. They know that hooligans visit this park regularly,” he said.

Technorati Tags: asia, bruce lee, china, east asia, hong kong, northeast asia

Via Tomorrow.sg, a Singaporean has started a blog aiming to recapture some of Singapore’s now vanished third-world charms.:

Recently I was in Myanmar for a business trip. On my way back to the airport, I shared the hotel car with a Japanese visitor. During our conversation, I remarked that Yangon was very much like Singapore during the time when I was a kid. Many of the old British style buildings resemble those in Singapore.

He was surprised and said that Singapore must have changed a lot during the past few decades. Yes, and too fast, I replied.

It occurred to me that life in Singapore, the physical landscape especially, has changed a lot during our lifetime. There are very few spots that have not changed during the past 30 years.

I have therefore started this blog to share my memories of life back in the 60′ s and 70’s when we were kids. If you are my age group, I am sure you too have a lot to share. Whenever, my old and friends and relatives get together, we like to reminisce about the good old days.

Technorati Tags: asia, east asia, singapore rebel, southeast asia