I experience a feeling of deja vu when dingok.com, a movie ticketing Web site, asks me for my national ID number. I know it’s not going to work, but I type in my Alien Resident Certificate (ARC) number anyway.
The words “incorrect format” immediately appear in Chinese. I can proceed no further. Pressed for time, I run to a nearby Family Mart and order the tickets through their kiosk. My Chinese is good enough to navigate the system, but I start thinking: what would a foreigner who is unfamiliar with Chinese do?
A CONVOLUTED PLATFORM
Photo: Han Cheung, Taipei Times
This is not the first time this has happened in the two years I’ve lived here. I still can’t pay my Chunghwa Telecom bill online or over the phone because it requires a national ID number. I’ve had issues with another movie ticket site and an online shopping site.
I’ve always dismissed these incidents as minor inconveniences and moved on with my life. But after the most recent annoyance with dingok.com, I call the National Development Council (NDC, 國家發展委員會), whose global talent retention policy states that one of its objectives is to “help resolve problems stemming from the difference in format between ARC and national ID numbers.” This was approved by the Executive Yuan last November.
The council directs me to “Platform for Resolving Alien Resident Certificate Issues Related to ID Number for Aliens,” a Web page with a list of frequently asked questions. The page begins in neatly laid out Chinese with different fonts and colors, while the English portion follows in a clunky block of text. Aside from the title, there is no indication in English that I can report my case through the site. A person from the NDC guarantees that the people operating the platform will contact these businesses. In fact, the agency encourages people to report every time there’s an issue, as it will help them identify noncomplying businesses.
At the very bottom of the page is a statement encouraging people to e-mail the National Immigration Agency director-general if they have “any other questions.” The problem, though, is that there is no direct link to the mailbox. I look all over and find it at the top of the page — in Chinese. I send off my gripes, politely, in English.
A reply in Chinese arrives one business day later. I ask them to write me in English. Two days after that, a coherent reply returns in English. The e-mail says that they had already contacted dingok.com in 2012 regarding the issue but they refused to comply due to “security issues.” It adds that the ticketing site is “willing to offer further assistance to aliens who have such problems individually,” and provides me with a customer service number.
As far as my phone bill, the council promised to refer my case for further assistance.
I call dingok.com’s customer service number and the agent tells me that they have to manually register all foreigners. He asks for my passport number, which I give, and I can finally use their site. In this instance, the ARC is completely useless.
Michael Fahey, a Taipei-based legal consultant, says there is currently no law requiring businesses to make their services ARC friendly. There is an amendment to the Immigration Act (入出國及移民法), which makes it illegal for businesses to refuse foreigners the use of their ARC number without cause, but it has yet to clear the Executive Yuan, an NDC official says. They hope that it will take effect by the end of this year. Until then, the agency can only pressure these businesses, the official says.
MAKE TAIWAN COMPETITIVE
Not being able to order movie tickets or pay phone bills with an ARC number may not seem that big of a deal, but the European Chamber of Commerce Taiwan (ECCT) has placed this issue at the top of its annual Better Living Position Paper that it presents to the government.
Tim Berge, co-chair of the Better Living Committee, says that the organization has been advocating the issue for the past five or six years.
“Often times, it is these every day mundane issues that can create the most inconvenience and frustration for people,” he says. “If Taiwan wants to compete with Hong Kong or Singapore … it has to be able to offer the same level of convenience. When foreign businesses bring people in and they encounter problems like this, it just gives Taiwan a bad name.”
In the beginning, the ECCT pushed for making ARC and national ID numbers identical in format, but the government wasn’t drawn to the idea because it would involve overhauling the entire system. Instead, they offered to contact the businesses on a case-by-case basis.
“Then it’s just a never-ending battle,” Berge says. “[If a foreigner] hasn’t bothered to complain, then the government never knows about it and nobody tells them to change. It doesn’t resolve the issue.”
Berge says the European chamber finally decided to push for legal change.
“There needs to be some kind of fine or other penalty that is actively enforced against those businesses that continue to ignore the needs of the international community simply because they can, and there are so few of us that it doesn’t matter,” Fahey says.
The NDC official claims that they have been able to resolve about 96 percent of the issues over the years. Berge agrees that the situation has improved. Although it’s “still not across the board,” some serious issues such as hospital registration have been remedied.
Fahey says that the government’s efforts have largely eliminated the problem in the public sector. Berge cites the High Speed Rail ticketing system, which has become ARC compatible.
Some private companies try to skirt the issue. Berge says one business simply asked him to modify his ARC number so it resembles a national ID, a risky practice as illustrated by a recent court case involving a woman who submitted a random ID number that turned out to belong to a Taiwanese citizen.
For now, Berge will be waiting to see if the amendment passes. And the European chamber will continue to push this issue until it is fully resolved.
“It’s not fair to foreign nationals legally residing in Taiwan paying taxes like everyone else,” he says.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist