Taiwanese not anti-business
Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (Foxconn) vice chairman and president of Japan’s Sharp Corp Tai Jeng-wu (戴正吳) during an interview last week said: “I love this place, Taiwan, but I have never felt any enthusiasm from Taiwanese, only coldness and a hostility toward business.”
Formosa Plastics Group chairman William Wong (王文淵) made a similar remark, acknowledging that Taiwan’s economy is not doing well, but that a worrying anti-business ideology has spread throughout society.
Is there really a pervasive anti-business, anti-wealth attitude among Taiwanese? I do not believe this is the case. Instead, there exists a general belief among the public that the government grants unfair favors to corporations.
Successive governments have used every excuse under the sun to say they are prioritizing the economy and continually granted businesses tax breaks and preferential tax rates.
For example, then-president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration in 2012 lowered the business income tax rate from 20 percent to 17 percent so that consolidated income tax overtook business income tax to become Taiwan’s highest tax rate.
When there are winners, there must also be losers: Taiwanese workers now shoulder the burden of paying the highest tax rate.
Tax filings for 2014 for consolidated income tax show that salaries and income constitute as much as 72.67 percent of consolidated income tax returns.
Furthermore, previous governments, citing the need to repatriate offshore funds and attract investment to Taiwan, have given financial incentives, reduced taxes and lowered the level of the inheritance tax.
This has resulted in some Taiwanese businesses moving capital back to Taiwan, yet there has often been no corresponding investment in the economy and these inflows of money were simply poured into the property market, pushing up house prices to the determent of ordinary Taiwanese.
The public is certainly not anti-business, nor does it resent the rich, but if attitudes have hardened in recent times, it is the fault of the those politicians and businessmen who have created this mess through their actions.
The public does respect businesses that create sustainable growth and fulfill their social obligations. Taiwanese are perfectly capable of making this distinction.
Bandying about over-simplified generalizations such as “anti-business” and “anti-wealth” insults the intelligence of the public.
Wei Si-yuan
Yilan
Stop demeaning women
As a college student who attended Computex Taiwan this week, I was dismayed and disappointed to find that many companies are still using showgirls to attract attention to their booths.
Barely a year ago, Microsoft apologized for hosting an after-party at the Game Developer’s Conference involving half-clothed dancers. It is to their credit that this year, Microsoft’s booth at Computex featured diverse presenters and uniform clothing.
However, other companies have missed the mark. Notably, right across from Microsoft’s booth at the Nangang Exhibition Hall, manufacturing company Elitegroup Computer Systems Co (ECS) heavily featured young women in tight dresses posing, smiling and displaying laptops.
Women are free to wear what they choose, yet ECS is clearly choosing to use these women as sex objects to attract visitors — the majority of whom are still overwhelmingly male.
In one case, I saw a male visitor asking one of the showgirls for her Instagram account.
It is embarrassing that at an event that claims to celebrate innovation and be “indicative of how next-generation technologies will look,” as co-organizer Walter Yeh (葉明水) said, Computex instead objectified women in a startlingly backward step for female empowerment.
If even the exhibit is unable to foster an inclusive atmosphere, how can we hope that “next-generation technologies” will do so?
Raya Juitung Kuo
Taipei
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