Two stories about the callous indifference of some humans made headlines this week, and while the details are completely different, the protagonists’ blinkered view of the world unites them.
The first story was about a 23-year-old man who died during a marathon gaming session at an Internet cafe and whose body sat unremarked by other gamers for more than 12 hours. Police said they were surprised that the other patrons were barely disturbed from their screens while they conducted their investigation. It was that reluctance to stop playing that was offensive. One might also ask why police did not clear the venue, after taking the patrons’ details and statements, and make them go out into the real world.
However, far more disturbing were comments from China Times owner and Want Want Group chairman Tsai Eng-meng (蔡衍明), who made headlines this week for an interview published in the Washington Post on Jan. 21.
Tsai told the Post that he used to fear the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and did not want to do business in China, but he changed his mind after the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, which he does not consider a massacre at all. He said he was struck by the image of a lone man standing in front of a line of tanks and that the man wasn’t killed.
“I realized that not that many people could really have died,” he was quoted as saying.
Since he gained the spotlight with these comments, Tsai has said his remarks were taken out of context and he would ask the Post for a correction. One might ask why he took three weeks to realize that there was a problem with the story. Perhaps he was too busy jetting back and forth to China in his bright red corporate plane to have the Post story translated.
Or maybe he just dismissed it, just as he apparently dismissed other images from Tiananmen, of bicycles crushed under tank treads and pools of blood on the road, of wounded people being rushed to hospitals in wooden carts and on friends’ backs. One wonders just how many people would have to be killed before Tsai would consider it a massacre?
However, it was not just the comments about Tiananmen that were offensive. He also thinks that China “is very democratic in lots of places” and that elections are fine, but economics should come first.
“From the standpoint of ordinary people, the most important thing is to eat a little better, sleep a little better and be a little happier,” the Post quoted him as saying. No wonder he gets along so well with the CCP and wants to see Taiwan united with China as soon as possible. His vision of democracy is in sync with that of the CCP leadership.
Tsai may not think much of elections, but most Taiwanese value their hard-won chance to have a say about who governs them and how. Why should they go back into the dark ages of the Martial Law era, which is what Chinese rule would bring. It certainly would not make them sleep better or feel happier, no matter what Tsai thinks.
He also told the Post that he only wants to help Taiwan get over its wariness of China. What he does not seem to understand is that it is Beijing’s own actions — events like Tiananmen, the imprisonment of Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波), the persecution of people like Ai Weiwei (艾未未), Gao Yaojie (高耀潔), Tibetan and Uighur rights activists and far too many others, the laughable system that Beijing calls its judiciary and the outright venality of CCP officials — that has made Taiwanese wary of China.
Not everyone can be blind to man’s inhumanity to man. Both the Internet cafe patrons and Tsai have been tested and found to be sadly wanting in humanity. Perhaps the young people in the cafe will have been sobered by their experience and emerge the better for it. However, Want Want’s boss will still be found wanting.
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
In the intricate ballet of geopolitics, names signify more than mere identification: They embody history, culture and sovereignty. The recent decision by China to refer to Arunachal Pradesh as “Tsang Nan” or South Tibet, and to rename Tibet as “Xizang,” is a strategic move that extends beyond cartography into the realm of diplomatic signaling. This op-ed explores the implications of these actions and India’s potential response. Names are potent symbols in international relations, encapsulating the essence of a nation’s stance on territorial disputes. China’s choice to rename regions within Indian territory is not merely a linguistic exercise, but a symbolic assertion
More than seven months into the armed conflict in Gaza, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective measures” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide following a case brought by South Africa regarding Israel’s breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The international community, including Amnesty International, called for an immediate ceasefire by all parties to prevent further loss of civilian lives and to ensure access to life-saving aid. Several protests have been organized around the world, including at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and many other universities in the US.
Every day since Oct. 7 last year, the world has watched an unprecedented wave of violence rain down on Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories — more than 200 days of constant suffering and death in Gaza with just a seven-day pause. Many of us in the American expatriate community in Taiwan have been watching this tragedy unfold in horror. We know we are implicated with every US-made “dumb” bomb dropped on a civilian target and by the diplomatic cover our government gives to the Israeli government, which has only gotten more extreme with such impunity. Meantime, multicultural coalitions of US