Along the camphor trail

Chu Mu-kun (朱木崑) carefully inspects a large boulder hauled from further up the Daniuci OId Trail (打牛崎古道). “This might work,” he says, rotating and repositioning it against the slope until it fits snugly. It takes two hours to manually make three steps using simple tools on the ancient trail, which has been rendered inaccessible due to the collapse of a wooden elevated walkway. “You have to transport goods up here to repair this walkway, which looks jarring against its surroundings to begin with,” Chu says. “Hand-built trails using readily available materials are easier to maintain and are better for the environment. We consider the comfort and safety of the user with each step.” More than 20 people, most of them first-timers including a few children, are participating in the trail-building workshop organized by the Nanshan Community (南山社區) in Hsinchu County’s Guansi Township (關西), and led by six instructors from the Thousand Miles Trail Association (千里步道協會). When complete, the Daniucih Old Trail will be part of the Raknus Selu (樟之細路), a roughly 400km-long network of historic paths connecting mostly Hakka villages from southern Taoyuan to northern Taichung. The association began promoting the trail in 2018, but it is still very much a work in progress. I was a bit disappointed when I tried to traverse portions of it last month, as little of it was marked and there was scant information along the way. Of course, I could have carefully mapped out the route beforehand, but I completely missed the two main historic paths in the Guansi area and ended up on a paved road for the entire first day. It wasn’t until the next day that I spotted the bright yellow Raknus Selu markers and its hand-built trails on the secluded Shihyingzih Trail (石硬子) near Beipu Township (北埔). When Hsu Ming-chien (徐銘謙),

By Han Cheung

Defying Chinese surveillance, young Uighurs abroad speak up online

Unwinding for the evening in her Washington, DC flat, Uighur activist Jewher Ilham often has two thoughts as she turns on her laptop: What should I watch tonight? And will I be interrupted by Chinese hackers again? From her Web cam switching on by itself to her laptop’s cursor moving around as she watches Netflix, it is a bugbear Ilham has learned to live with since she started criticizing the Chinese government for detaining her father, a Uighur academic, nearly a decade ago. “When I’m bored, I talk to my laptop and I wave and say, ‘Hi, are you watching me? Actually, you shouldn’t waste your time on me because I have really nothing important or interesting for you to dig into,’” the 26-year-old labor activist said. Ilham is part of a growing chorus of young Uighurs living overseas who are mobilizing online and using social media to campaign against forced labor in China’s northwestern Xinjiang province, home to the Uighur Muslim minority. Despite living abroad, many believe expanding their digital footprint through their online activism has made them — and their families — more of a target. “I do feel conflicted every single day. If I speak up about my dad, would they torture my dad? Is it going to cause more harm?” said Ilham, who left China for the US in 2013 and now works at the global Worker Rights Consortium. China for months has pushed back against global criticism of its Xinjiang policies, with officials in China’s Foreign Ministry and the Xinjiang government saying the efforts are necessary to counter “lies and slander” by a network of “anti-China forces” abroad. “There are some people hired by Western anti-China forces acting out made-up stories to smear Xinjiang and China abroad and make a living out of it,” the Chinese embassy in Washington said in an

By Lin Taylor

Book review: Kathryn Heyman on writing her ‘white hot’ memoir

At 21, Kathryn Heyman didn’t have the luxury of “finding herself” in India like her peers. She had no money, no safety net and had learned to never rely upon others. Instead, she hitch-hiked to Darwin with her journals and favorite books — and notions of a Kerouac-style adventure — and bagged a job as a cook on a fishing trawler, a boat called the Ocean Thief. She was later relegated to deckhand when it was discovered she could barely boil an egg. She had a list of names that she’d carried around with her for months, of men who had steeped her in shame. Now she threw it overboard. As she writes in her new memoir, Fury, it was among this feral crew, this dysfunctional family of outcasts out in the Timor Sea, that she felt the safest. “I felt unreasonably grateful for the simple fact of being on a boat with four men who would not hurt me. I was swollen with gratitude because they chose to honor the most basic of human exchanges,” she writes. Fury is Heyman’s first memoir. It’s powerful, masterful and something she never expected to write, being committed to fiction. But while her six novels span centuries and continents, there is this common theme of survival. Growing up, there was no safe harbor for Heyman. By the time she was in her late teens she had experienced a relentless litany of sexual harassment and assault; a war of attrition against a girl with low social currency. The effect was to be siloed from her friends and family. Speaking from her home in Sydney, Heyman is warm and friendly. It’s hard to imagine the “spiky” teenager she describes. “I think it’s a kind of psychopathology, to just keep running,” she reflects. But actually, there was plenty to run from. Raised in a

By Jenny Valentish

Napoleon’s troublesome legacy

When France commemorates the bicentenary of Napoleon Bonaparte’s death today, Aurelie Ramassamy will remember a tyrant who reversed the abolition of slavery rather than an emperor often lionized as a hero for his battlefield triumphs. Like most Creoles on the Indian Ocean island of Reunion, one of France’s overseas departments, Ramassamy is a descendant of slaves. Family folklore says her mother’s ancestors were shipped to the island to labor on its coffee and sugar plantations. Her conviction that France turns a blind eye to the harsher aspects of Napoleon’s rule comes at a time the Black Lives Matter movement is emboldening those who denounce the honoring of a leader who placed economic prosperity above universal rights. “In no circumstances should he be celebrated,” Ramassamy said after laying flowers at the foot of a shrine to the Black Madonna. Local legend says the Black Madonna hid a fugitive Black from slave-hunters, saving his life. In 1802, Napoleon restored slavery by decree in the French Caribbean and Reunion, even if the 1794 abolition had never been applied on the island more than 9,000km southeast of Paris. Revolts were violently put down while white landowners, and the empire, got richer. Black historians say Napoleon’s links to slavery remain unaddressed in France, which still grapples with its colonial past and charges of deep-rooted racism by ethnic minorities. It was no longer possible to reduce his legacy to an account of military adventure and French grandeur, said Dominique Taffin of the Slavery Memorial Foundation. “It’s not re-writing history, it’s enriching history,” she said. Napoleon is widely revered as a military genius and a master administrator who created France’s penal code, the administrative system of prefets and Lycee high schools. He ruled initially as First Consul after a coup in 1799 and then as emperor, dominating European affairs for more than a decade. He was neither pro-slavery,

Mexico apologizes to the Maya

Mexico on Monday marked the anniversary of a 1901 battle that ended one of the last indigenous rebellions in North America, by issuing an apology for centuries of brutal exploitation and discrimination. Monday’s ceremony was held in the hamlet of Tihosuco in the Mayan township of Felipe Carrillo Puerto, the headquarters of the rebellion. It comes amid broader commemorations of the 500th anniversary of the 1519 to 1521 Spanish conquest of Mexico, and 200 years of Mexico’s 1821 independence from Spain. “For centuries, these people have suffered exploitation and abuse,” said Interior Secretary Olga Sanchez Cordero. “Today we recognize something which we have denied for a long time, the wrongs and injustices committed against the Mayan people.” “Today, we ask forgiveness in the name of the Mexican government for the injustices committed against you throughout our history and for the discrimination which even now you are victims of,” she said. President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador was accompanied by President Alejandro Giammattei of Guatemala, the neighboring country that has a majority Mayan population. The Mayas of Quintana Roo — who fought a rebellion between 1847 and 1901 against Mexican settlers and the government known as “the War of the Castes” — still live on the Caribbean coast. The rebellion was finally ended when Mexican troops captured Felipe Carrillo Puerto between May 4 and May 5, 1901. While Mexico’s Mayas have survived, they have been largely locked out of the rich tourism industry that has sprung up at coastal resorts like Cancun and Playa del Carmen since 1974. Most eke out livings as small-scale farmers or fruit growers, or as construction or cleaning workers at resorts. “We realize that we have a great history, that we are held up as an example, and people make a lot of money off our name, but

Generational split on confronting anti-Asian racism

The fatal shootings of eight people — six of them women of Asian descent — at Georgia massage businesses in March propelled Claire Xu into action. Within days, she helped organize a rally condemning violence against Asian Americans that drew support from a broad group of activists, elected officials and community members. But her parents objected. “‘We don’t want you to do this,’” Xu, 31, recalled their telling her afterward. “‘You can write about stuff, but don’t get your face out there.’” The shootings and other recent attacks on Asian Americans have exposed a generational divide in the community. Many young activists say their parents and other elders are saddened by the violence but question the value of protests or worry about their consequences. They’ve also found the older generations tend to identify more closely with their ethnic groups — Chinese or Vietnamese, for example — and appear reluctant to acknowledge racism. That divide makes it harder to forge a collective Asian American constituency that can wield political power and draw attention to the wave of assaults against people of Asian descent in the US since the COVID-19 pandemic began, community leaders say. “In our original countries, where our ancestors came from, they wouldn’t even imagine that someone from Bangladesh would be lumped in the same group as someone from Laos,” said Angela Hsu, president of the Georgia Asian Pacific American Bar Association. FOREIGN AT HOME But those differences obscure a shared experience of “feeling like we’re constantly thought of as being foreign in our own country,” said US Representative Andy Kim, of New Jersey. Much of the recent violence against Asian Americans has targeted the elderly, and some seniors have attended rallies to condemn it. But Cora McDonnell, 79, said she did not want to speak out, though she is now scared to

Hungarian school of CCP?

Piles of garbage, discarded debris and abandoned buildings are scattered across a post-industrial area on the left bank of the Danube River, just south of the grandiose downtown of Hungary’s capital, Budapest. The area has been unused for decades, languishing in post-socialist decay in the 30 years since anti-communist firebrands pressed for the end of Soviet domination in Hungary at the end of the 1980s. But it’s here that one of those early reformers, Hungary’s right-wing nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orban, envisions building a gigantic university that has pledged its allegiance to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This week, Hungary signed a strategic agreement with the Shanghai-based Fudan University on opening a campus in Budapest by 2024. It would be the school’s only foreign outpost, and the first Chinese university campus in the 27-nation European Union. Hungarian officials insist that Fudan, ranked among the top 100 universities in the world, will help raise higher education standards in Hungary, providing courses to 6,000 Hungarian, Chinese and other students and bringing Chinese investment and research into the country. But critics say the massive investment places an undue financial burden on Hungarian taxpayers and shows Orban’s warming ties with autocracies in Moscow and Beijing. “They want to bring in a university, which is indeed a serious university on the international level, but its charter requires that it represent the worldview of the Chinese Communist Party,” said Budapest mayor Gergely Karacsony, who opposes the plan. “We see very serious national security risks in this investment.” ‘EASTERN OPENING’ Government documents obtained in April by Hungarian investigative journalism center Direkt36 show that pretax construction costs for the 26-hectare campus are estimated at US$1.8 billion, more than Hungary spent on its entire higher education system in 2019. The state plans to finance around 20 percent of the project from its central budget, and the

Notes from central Taiwan: Taiwan: Island of bosses

The media reported this week on another government stimulus program to make the birth rate rise. Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) said that the budget for the government’s programs would reach NT$85 billion (US$3.05 billion) by 2023, and said that the government’s monthly subsidy for child support would rise from NT$3,500 to NT$5,000. These measures are a well-meaning attempt to address Taiwan’s globally low fertility and birth rates, but they are rather like poking a heart attack victim with a stick in the hope of reviving him. The problems driving the low birth rates are well known: the lack and cost of childcare, the lack of time off for new parents, long working hours that send parents home late in the evening too exhausted for additional labor, low wages for most workers, skyrocketing housing costs, an inhuman educational system and a terrible physical and social environment for raising children. Nowhere in the government plan is there much will to meaningfully address any of these issues. Taiwan is hardly alone: the same problems are endemic across the East Asian developmentalist states. Low birth rates are also an issue in South Korea and Japan. This week analysts and the media revealed that China’s census is also showing a remarkable drop in birth rates, and that China is apparently overstating the size of its population. The East Asian economies were all built on the same model of a modern export sector directed outward, and a domestic economy driven by a construction-industrial state that sprays concrete across the national landscape. It’s hardly surprising that they are facing the same social and demographic issues. One thing they also share is brutal cultures of work overseen by patriarchal, authoritarian bosses. However you turn the prism to see Taiwan’s problems from a new angle, Boss Island, as Shieh Gwo-shyong’s (謝國雄)

By Michael Turton

Taiwan in Time: The fall of the northern Atayal

May 3 to May 9 The Japanese soldiers thought they had already subjugated the Atayal when they set out toward the mountains of today’s eastern Taoyuan on May 5, 1907. The two brigades, one from the north and one from the south, were tasked with pushing the colonial government’s frontier defense lines deeper into Aboriginal territory to gain access to valuable camphor. “The defense lines were used to protect the economic activities, mainly camphor production, on the [Japanese] side of the line,” writes Wu Cheng-hsien (吳政憲) in the paper, “The Principle and Utilization of the Mortars on the Frontier Defense Lines” (近代臺灣隘勇線臼砲之原理與應用). “When the government needed to increase their camphor production, they would repeatedly move the frontier defense line further into the mountains.” The Atayal refused to accept these actions. They thought the boundaries had been set when they acknowledged Japanese rule a year earlier. One group ambushed the northern brigade in the south of today’s Sindian District (新店) in New Taipei City, but was quickly defeated. The new border cut through their traditional hunting grounds, and the community lost its land and its ability to resist. The southern brigade had a much harder time, as they faced a coalition of various Atayal groups and Han Taiwanese rebels. The group with the most at stake was the Bngciq, who had suffered greatly in a prolonged conflict with the Japanese. If the colonizers got their way, the entire Bngciq territory would end up on the government-controlled side of the frontier, putting the other groups under direct threat. Thus began the Battle of Zhentoushan (枕頭山戰役), a bloody conflict that began on May 5, 1907 and lasted 107 days and required the Japanese to call thousands of reinforcements from central Taiwan to suppress. In the end, Bngciq chief Watan Syat sued for peace, and the Japanese

By Han Cheung

Beef noodles, hot pot ... and beef Wellington?

Take a filet mignon and smother it in a mixture of thyme, shallots and chestnut mushrooms. Add a layer of prosciutto and finally wrap it up in a blanket of puff pastry. It’s a classic recipe for beef Wellington, a holiday showstopper at upscale restaurants from New York to London. But what started in England 200 years ago, has crept its way into Taiwan’s culinary scene. From high-end restaurants in Taipei to night markets in Taichung, beef Wellington is on the menu. “Customers are really curious about beef Wellington,” said Daniel Yang (楊士儀), chef and owner of Taichung’s Just Diner. “Some have never heard of it. Others saw it on Gordon Ramsay’s show.” At Yang’s open-air restaurant, customers need to pre-order the beef Wellington, which features a 10oz cut of filet mignon. Yang hopes to sell 50 servings per week, roughly five times the amount he currently sells at NT$820 apiece. Yang, who grew up in California and immigrated to Taiwan in 2010, aims to move beef Wellington off the holiday menu and on to the daily menu. The inspiration for the dish initially came from a visit to Daniel Boulud’s Michelin-starred restaurant in New York, where Yang paid US$100 for an immaculate beef Wellington. Then after watching celebrity chef Ramsay cook it on his Hell’s Kitchen show, he was hooked. DIFFICULT DISH “Beef Wellington is really a test of knowledge and experience. A lot can go wrong,” said Yang, rattling off a list of common mistakes. Because the meat is tucked inside a pastry shell, it can easily be overcooked. The fickle dish can also falter from a crumbly pastry shell. And then there’s the mushroom puree, that if too wet will result in an inedible, mushy mess. On a recent Friday night, the informal atmosphere at Just Diner was perfect

By John Evans

Highways & Byways: Taiwan’s shadow-puppet capital

I arrived in Kaohsiung’s Gangshan District (岡山) hoping to learn about shadow puppetry, and left with a renewed respect for this often-overlooked town. Kaohsiung Museum of Shadow Puppets (高雄市皮影戲館) is part of Gangshan Cultural Center (岡山文化中心). The museum, which has been revised and repaired since it first opened in 1994, currently occupies part of the first floor. While far from huge, it does provide a decent introduction in Chinese and English. Taiwanese shadow puppetry, unlike the form of glove puppetry known as budaixi (布袋戲, “cloth bag drama”), is fairly obscure. In the past, shadow-puppet performances were a feature of temple celebrations. Nowadays, the four remaining professional troupes — all based in Kaohsiung, and none having more than seven members — aim to please human audiences with shows inspired by Chinese literary classics. SHADOW PUPPETRY According to a text panel, Chinese shadow puppetry might date from the Han dynasty (202 BCE to 220 AD), the Tang dynasty (618 to 907), or the Song dynasty (960 to 1279). The golden age of Hoklo-language (also known as Taiwanese) shadow puppetry in Taiwan was the first third of the 20th century, when social stability and economic growth provided opportunities for all sorts of entertainers and cultural workers. However, between the late 1930s and 1945, the colonial government insisted that performers use the Japanese language and adhere to scripts approved by Japanese officials. One section of the museum explains how shadow puppets are made. The preferred materials are buffalo hide, donkey skin and sheep skin. Translucency is essential, so the skins are thoroughly washed and bleached before carving. Shadow play isn’t a monochromatic medium. Dyeing the leather (usually red or green) is the final stage before the addition of jointed, moving parts such as the head and limbs. The museum displays several beautifully-crafted puppets. Unfortunately, visitors aren’t allowed to take photographs

By Steven Crook

Oscars 2022: who might triumph at next year’s ceremony?

It’s not often that the word unusual gets attached to the Oscars, one of the most staid and predictable nights of the year, as sober as the Golden Globes is drunk. But after an unusual year, the awards season followed suit, extended by two months, films dropping in and out of the race and some that might otherwise have been ignored instead taking centre stage. But when the night finally arrived, things had settled back into a rhythm, so much so that looking back to the last time we made recklessly early predictions, seven out of 10 ended up receiving a nod with two of them winning (the other three were from films that were taken off the schedule). So, with some vague sense of confidence, here goes our look ahead to next year: ADAM DRIVER After graduating from a best supporting actor nomination for BlacKkKlansman to best actor for Marriage Story just a year later, the next 12 months could well push Adam Driver closer to a win with three awards-friendly films on the way. The two most likely to appeal to the Academy (his Cannes-premiering Sparks musical Annette, co-starring Marion Cotillard, could be a little too arthouse for voters) both come from Ridley Scott and both tell violent true stories from Europe, albeit from vastly different time periods and with vastly different characters at their center. The first, The Last Duel, supposed to be part of the most recent Oscars season before being pushed back, tells the story of best friends in 14th century France who go to war after one is accused of raping the other’s wife. It’s delicate territory but the screenplay, which reunites Oscar-winners Ben Affleck and Matt Damon (the latter playing the lead), also includes input from one of the most empathetic female screenwriters working today, Nicole Holofcener,

By Benjamin Lee

Practicing LNT in Taiwan

Taiwan is a wonderful place for outdoor recreation, from surfing to alpine hiking and every recreational activity in between. With many of us enjoying Taiwan’s natural spaces, how can we keep our impact on the environment low while still enjoying the outdoors? This is a question that I’ve been trying to answer in my eight years hiking in Taiwan. I’ve landed on an answer that has suited me in the form of Leave No Trace (LNT). LNT is built around seven principles of practices and ethics for outdoor recreation. These principles are not fixed rules; rather they are a way to decrease recreational impact on the environment, be aware of other visitors’ experiences and find a way to minimize or avoid impacting the environment and others. Though you might see signs that display the seven principles of LNT at trailheads, the question remains of how to implement them. I’d been aware of LNT for years but never knew to what extent I could practice the concepts until I took a trainer course last year. Because of this, I’d like to share the principles and give a brief overview of the principles. PLAN AHEAD AND PREPARE Know about the area you are visiting including weather conditions before you set out. Have enough food, water, clothes and appropriate gear for your planned activity. Make sure your plan is suitable for all members of your group. Have a map of the area. Using a GPS map app can be very helpful with route plotting. TRAVEL AND CAMP ON DURABLE SURFACES When hiking, stay on trail as much as possible. When going off trail, try to stay on rock, gravel or barren soil, and avoid stepping on plants. Remain on the original trail to prevent trail widening and vegetation loss. If there’s a mud puddle in the middle

By Stephanie Hammermiller

A rich offering of true stories

With a dizzying array of offerings ranging from acclaimed international productions to fuzzy vintage curiosities to experimental performance theater, it’s always hard to know where to start with the Taiwan International Documentary Festival (TIDF). It’s even a tougher task for the preliminary judges, who each sifted through between 200 and 300 submissions, then argue their cases against other judges before whittling the final list down to 45. To help the audience out, judge Sun Sung-jung (孫松榮) gave his top picks for the international competition section at a talk earlier this month. Erased: Ascent of the Invisible is a conceptual and philosophical piece exploring the forgotten or covered-up victims, sites and atrocities of the Lebanese Civil War, while The Makavejev Case or Trial in a Movie Theater examines the public debate held in 1971 Yugoslavia on whether the controversial film WR: Mysteries of the Organism should be banned. Sun also mentions the only Taiwanese selection, Huang Pang-chuan’s (黃邦銓) 18-minute Last Year When the Train Passed by (去年火車經過的時候). Huang snapped a few photos while riding on a train in France, and later returned to the scene of each photograph to ask if locals residents remembered what they were doing at that moment. Delayed for a year because of COVID-19, the 12th edition of the film festival kicks off tomorrow with nearly 140 productions from across the world. In addition to the main competition section, which is separated into international, Asia and Taiwan portions, there are plenty of special screening programs as well as events, performances and talks across Taipei. For the Taiwanese portion of the competition, festival coordinator Chen Wan-ling (陳婉伶) recommends Flow (伏流), a stream-of-consciousness exploration of the neighborhoods near Taipei’s Treasure Hill Artist Village (寶藏巖國際藝術村) and their residents. Housing (買房子賣房子) delves into Taiwan’s real estate business and examines its underlying capitalist

By Han Cheung

Book review: A generous and heartfelt biography of Edward Said

“Long after his death in 2003, Edward Said remains a partner in many imaginary conversations.” The opening line of Tim Brennan’s biography of Said is true — it’s hard to come up with another thinker who remains so present in his absence. Some 50 or so books have been written about him. His writings are taught in universities across the world. Look on social media and you’ll find him constantly referred to, in easy, familiar terms, by the young across the globe. His portrait is on the walls of the old cities of Palestine, in the company of the martyrs. The events of the past years, not least the Arab uprisings and the counter-revolutionary triumphs that followed them, have been for many of us occasions where we turned to his ideas and his example. Said bestrode not just one world, but several. Just as he was at the same moment a New Yorker and a Palestinian brought up in Egypt, he was also a literary critic, a theorist, a political activist, a musician and more. And if this led to him being “not quite right” in any one world, his genius was to transmute this condition into the engine of ideas around which a considerable part of the intellectual and political life of these worlds came to revolve. Brennan was Said’s student and friend, familiar with his ideas and comfortable in his company. For Places of Mind he worked closely with Said’s family, conducted interviews with a wide range of his friends and colleagues and (he must have) thoroughly mined the archive held in Columbia University, where Said taught for his entire career. (One delightful moment in the book is when Brennan finds that Said’s teaching notes from 1964 to 1984 prove his old teacher’s statement that some of his best ideas

By Ahdaf Soueif

The crow who caws for the land

Huang Huan-chang (黃煥彰) was once nearly run over by an angry business owner whom he reported on for polluting a fish farm. The long-time environmental activist is used to threats, and vividly recounts the time a factory boss trapped him inside a complex, and he had to use a hammer to smash a lock and escape. Although Huang sees himself as a crow, tirelessly cawing at the government and industry for the past 26 years to protect the environment, his opponents call him a ghost. He earned the moniker in the early 2010s after he revealed that Taiwan Alkali Industrial Corp (TAIC, 台鹼公司) was polluting tilapia fish farms in Tainan with dioxin and mercury. “From 2010 to 2015, I was constantly there,” Huang says. “I recorded them testing the soil. I followed them when they investigated runoff to fisheries. I shadowed their every move, and they began saying, ‘we’ve been possessed by a ghost!’ The most vital part of environmental activism is being on site. I’ve been closely following some of these cases for 20 years, and if government officials want to argue with me, I know exactly how to rebuke them.” Huang won the Lifetime Environmental Protection Award earlier this month at the Environmental Non-Governmental Organizations Convention in Taipei, earning him a three-minute audience with President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), where he discussed lax government policy and ongoing issues regarding industrial waste disposal. Although Huang has drawn public attention to land use issues, he laments that the overall situation hasn’t improved in the last 26 years because the worst offenders have gotten sneakier in their dumping practices. Instead of piling up mounds of waste as they did in the old days, they now use loopholes in the law to get away with burying it — often without proper treatment — on farmland

By Han Cheung

Did the BBC plagiarize TT feature?

After the BBC published “The ‘good luck’ snack that makes Taiwan’s technology behave” on April 16, the Taiwanese media predictably gave it wall-to-wall coverage. “BBC reveals magical use of Taiwan’s ‘Green Kuaikuai.’ Netizen: ‘State secrets discovered!’” blared the Apple Daily. “BBC reports on the mystical phenomena of Taiwan’s ‘treasure in the machine,’” wrote CNA. “BBC decodes ‘TSMC [Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, 台積電] myth’ and talks about the legend of green Kuaikuai,” said ETToday. The reports framed the story as though a BBC reporter had somehow “discovered” that Taiwanese use the snack Kuaikuai as a talisman to protect their tech. The problem is the BBC didn’t “decode” anything. Rather, their reporter, Hope Ngo, plagiarized the ideas and arguments from a feature, “How a snack protects Taiwan’s tech,” I published in November last year. How do we know this? Because the insight that Taiwanese use Kuaikuai as a talisman requires exhaustive knowledge of Taiwan’s folk culture — knowledge that I’ve cultivated over the past 15 years. BREAKING THE GOLDEN RULE OF JOURNALISM The golden rule of journalism is that you don’t copy the words or ideas of other reporters. I’m not going to lecture the BBC or test the patience of the reader with how fundamental this is to journalistic ethics. (“Google it!”). As Wall Street Journal reporter Benjamin Mullin writes in a plagiarism for dummies explainer in the US-based nonprofit Poynter Institute of Media Studies: “Is the article a complete retread of another story, with little new insight?” Taking this measure as our starting point, let’s examine some of the evidence before us. The following items compare passages/quotes taken from the Nov. 19 Taipei Times (TT) article and the BBC article, published on April 16. Firstly, although my headline is shorter and pithier, there is little difference between it and the one found on the BBC. Taipei

By Noah Buchan