Nelson Liu (劉寧生) has sailed around the world, but he's lucky if he can venture further than a few nautical miles in local waters.
This year, a Kaohsiung harbor official denied him permission to sail his 9m sailboat New Era (跨世紀號) to Penghu, on the grounds that it lacked individual lifeboats for each person. Last year, a port official refused permission for a voyage to Kenting. He told Liu that letting a foreign vessel go harbor hopping would humiliate Taiwan in the same way that China was humiliated when forced to open its ports after the Opium War.
"'Are you out of your mind?'" Liu, 58, recalls asking the official. "How did you come up with this idea?" Liu is Taiwanese but has to register the New Era as a recreational vessel in the US, because here it would be classified as a commercial boat. Although Taiwan is an island and builds more private yachts than any country except the US and Italy, people like Liu have to jump through a lot of hoops to own and operate a boat for private recreational purposes here.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF NELSON LIU
There are perplexing rules dating from the martial law era and designed to prevent spies from sneaking in from China. Only two marinas exist — in Kenting and Longdong — for pleasure craft, and many sailors have to dock their sailboats at fishing wharves. And there are unsympathetic port administration bureaucrats who grew up when few Taiwanese could learn to swim, much less tie a stopper knot or put a tail block on the fall of a tackle.
"I am proud to say that we are world-famous for our yachts, but we have the strictest laws in the world today. We cannot have [yachts] in this country," said Jack Chen (陳朝南), chairman of the board of the Taiwan Yacht Industry Association. Chen, who is also CEO and general manager of Bluewater Yacht Builders, who was interviewed at his factory in Sanzhi (三芝鄉), where five fiberglass hulls were under construction for export to the US and Europe. "Actually, we can have (yachts), it's just very inconvenient and problematic."
Chen says that local manufacturers would initially sell 150 to 200 smaller yachts each year to Taiwanese customers if the government built more marinas and brought the relevant laws in line with international practices. He estimates that the increased production would create 800 to 900 manufacturing jobs, not to mention more work for people in related fields. His company used to manufacture 30 small yachts a year. Now it makes a dozen 15m or larger custom-built yachts each year, which sell for roughly NT$30 million or more. He has never sold a boat in Taiwan.
To build a yacht for a local customer, Chen would have to first submit the blueprints to the government. If the plans were approved, the government would send an inspector to check the boat several times during construction. This process is only required for commercial boats in other countries, and Taiwan does not inspect boats slated for export, Chen said.
Prospective buyers also have to take a course and pass an examination for a captain's license before they can take possession of a boat. And they need a berth for their ships before you can obtain this license, which is difficult because space is limited at Taiwan's two marinas.
To get around the red tape, some owners register their vessels as fishing boats instead of yachts. Others buy a fishing boat to secure a berth, then dock their yacht in the fishing harbor instead, even though Liu said this is "like parking your Mercedes next to a bunch of trucks." Once you've done all that, you still need permission from harbor officials to sail it. This is generally granted for voyages of a few nautical miles. But if you're planning a trip from one local harbor to another, you need permission from the port adminis-tration at both locations. And this is hard to get.
"In Taiwan it's very tricky. Anybody can come and tell us what to do or not to do. But maybe the next person will say it's ok," said Liu, who in 2001 became the first ethnic Chinese to circumnavigate the globe, on board New Era. He added that recreational sailors "can go out anytime from a harbor in the US, France or the UK without telling anyone anything, unless they're suspicious that you're doing something bad. I tell this to officials here, and they don't believe me."
Tommy Weng (翁世賢), executive manager of the Outdoor Camping Association of Taipei County, sailed through the Caribbean Sea when he lived in Miami two decades ago. He imported a sailboat when he returned to Taiwan, where it then sat in a warehouse pending government approval for a permit. The process took so long that the cost of warehousing the boat eventually exceeded its purchase price. He sold the boat.
"I saw how Western societies enjoy the water, sailing and other outdoor activities that belong to the young," Weng, 61, said. He noted he encountered similar problems when trying to import camping trailers and said little has changed over the past 20 years. "I'm disappointed that we can't do the same here."
Weng and other sailors believe that harbormasters and officials at the Ministry of Transportation and Communications, which regulates shipping, don't understand recreational sailing because they've never tried it themselves. "They don't care because they are old. They are afraid to do something wrong and lose their retirement fund," Weng said.
The ultimate cause of all these problems, Chen and Liu said, is that Taiwan's Act of Ships (船舶法) and other maritime laws were not written with recreational sailing in mind.
Two years ago, the Executive Yuan proposed a yachting law (遊艇法) that would have eased these restrictions and made it easier to own and operate boats for personal recreation. Chen and Liu negotiated with the Ministry of Transportation and Communications, which was tasked with drafting the new law. Academics were hired to explain how other countries regulated recreational boating. After two years, the ministry abandoned the effort. "We came very close," Liu said. "They said they could not do it because of conditions in the Taiwan Strait," Chen said.
Chen Yu-cheng (陳育正), an official in the ministry's Department of Navigation and Aviation, said in an interview that the government decided to scrap the unfinished yachting law because it did not want to add a new layer of regulations and bureaucracy.
"We think yachts in Taiwan can be regulated by (existing) laws," he said. "We're adjusting the parts of those laws that don't work now."
Tweaking the shipping laws is not enough, Bluewater Yacht's Chen said. "Those regulations are 30 or 50 years old. They were made by people who didn't understand yachting." There are other laws and government agencies, from the Coast Guard to the Council of Agricultural Affairs, whose regulations affect private yachting. And there are vested interests like fishermen who might not want to see more yachts.
As an example, Chen points to the fact that fishermen enjoy exclusive rights to a 4.8km zone around Taiwan's coast. They can veto projects like marinas, and have caused problems for a proposed third marina in Kaohsiung County. For Liu and Chen, the yachting law they sought — with eased and clarified restrictions on private boating and provisions for things like marinas —would have cut the proverbial Gordian knot. "We were so close," Liu said. "It makes me angry," Chen said. "We thought they were finally going to change."
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s