Justice, Taichung-style
While the Taiwanese judicial system is busy prosecuting the Chen family, justice as a lived reality on the streets of Taichung took a sad and predictable turn this week.
A foreigner, fired upon with a BB gun, accosted the assailant, who then shot him seven times, including three times in the face. The victim used the assailant’s gun case as protection and then, when close enough, hit the shooter with the case.
The assailant ran to his parked SUV, produced a 9mm hand pistol and pointed it at the victim. After questioning the authenticity of the weapon, the assailant pulled out the clip to prove that it was real, whereupon the victim grabbed the clip and threw it into the canal.
The angered assailant then threatened to shoot the foreigner with the remaining bullet. A nearby sausage vendor with a clear view of the incident refused to help or intervene.
When the police arrived, they did not carry out a full forensic search of the assailant’s vehicle and they passed around evidence without gloves, even permitting the assailant to handle it at times. They did not question the assailant’s girlfriend or the sausage vendor.
The foreigner did not have his statement taken for more than six hours. In the meantime, the assailant gave a statement and was allowed to fall asleep two tables away from the pistol and single bullet, lying unsecured.
Later in the morning, the assailant sued the victim for damage to his property (the illegal clip of ammunition) and insulting behavior.
The foreigner was asked to sign an admission that he was an active criminal involved in an assault. This was part of a form that would allow him to press charges against the assailant.
Paradoxically, the prosecutor for the case was more sympathetic than the legal counsel, who mainly acted as a translator in the courtroom.
In court, a judge repeated the charges. Despite a sense that a threat on his life was not being taken seriously, the foreigner chose to defend himself and argued his case well enough to be cleared of all charges.
The judge ordered the assailant to give the victim compensation, to be agreed by negotiation, but then — unbelievably — the legal counsel wanted to give the victim’s phone number to the assailant so that he could discuss compensation directly.
As a result of being shot on a quiet night in the center of Taichung, this foreigner also lost his job when his school’s administrators, supposedly fearful of gang-related retaliation, canceled his work permit. He may now have to leave Taiwan.
With Taichung again rated as Taiwan’s most crime-ridden city, its mayor’s pride in his accomplishments and his description of it as retaining “friendliness and warm-heartedness” seem out of sync and prematurely self-congratulatory.
We need to look beyond these rhetorical flourishes and diversionary sound bites and hold leaders to account for the grimy reality they tolerate, not the one that their spin would have us believe.
BEN GOREN
Baojhong, Yunlin County
Jan. 1 marks a decade since China repealed its one-child policy. Just 10 days before, Peng Peiyun (彭珮雲), who long oversaw the often-brutal enforcement of China’s family-planning rules, died at the age of 96, having never been held accountable for her actions. Obituaries praised Peng for being “reform-minded,” even though, in practice, she only perpetuated an utterly inhumane policy, whose consequences have barely begun to materialize. It was Vice Premier Chen Muhua (陳慕華) who first proposed the one-child policy in 1979, with the endorsement of China’s then-top leaders, Chen Yun (陳雲) and Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平), as a means of avoiding the
The last foreign delegation Nicolas Maduro met before he went to bed Friday night (January 2) was led by China’s top Latin America diplomat. “I had a pleasant meeting with Qiu Xiaoqi (邱小琪), Special Envoy of President Xi Jinping (習近平),” Venezuela’s soon-to-be ex-president tweeted on Telegram, “and we reaffirmed our commitment to the strategic relationship that is progressing and strengthening in various areas for building a multipolar world of development and peace.” Judging by how minutely the Central Intelligence Agency was monitoring Maduro’s every move on Friday, President Trump himself was certainly aware of Maduro’s felicitations to his Chinese guest. Just
A recent piece of international news has drawn surprisingly little attention, yet it deserves far closer scrutiny. German industrial heavyweight Siemens Mobility has reportedly outmaneuvered long-entrenched Chinese competitors in Southeast Asian infrastructure to secure a strategic partnership with Vietnam’s largest private conglomerate, Vingroup. The agreement positions Siemens to participate in the construction of a high-speed rail link between Hanoi and Ha Long Bay. German media were blunt in their assessment: This was not merely a commercial win, but has symbolic significance in “reshaping geopolitical influence.” At first glance, this might look like a routine outcome of corporate bidding. However, placed in
China often describes itself as the natural leader of the global south: a power that respects sovereignty, rejects coercion and offers developing countries an alternative to Western pressure. For years, Venezuela was held up — implicitly and sometimes explicitly — as proof that this model worked. Today, Venezuela is exposing the limits of that claim. Beijing’s response to the latest crisis in Venezuela has been striking not only for its content, but for its tone. Chinese officials have abandoned their usual restrained diplomatic phrasing and adopted language that is unusually direct by Beijing’s standards. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs described the
RSS