Heavy discrimination against Chinese spouses has deterred some victims of domestic abuse from seeking help, women's rights activists said yesterday, in a bid to call attention to a murder trial starting today involving a Chinese spouse who stabbed her abusive Taiwanese husband last year.
"The animosity toward Chinese immigrants is still extremely prevalent in southern Taiwan. Many Taiwanese husbands treat their Chinese wives as no more than dispensable baby-making machines and human punching bags," said Wang Chuan-ping (王娟萍), president of a non-profit organization dedicated to issues involving cross-strait marriages.
In addition to the discrimination they face, Wang said many Chinese women married to abusive Taiwanese men hesitate to report the abuse because they are afraid their spouses will retaliate.
Victims are often ignorant of their rights as well, as they are kept as virtual prisoners in their homes, said Sandy Yeh (
Yeh said that Chinese spouses make up 66 percent of the 400,000 foreign spouses in Taiwan.
Yeh's group is trying to rally support for Chinese national Zhao Yanbing (
In July, the Taipei District Court convicted Zhao of murder, but reduced her sentence to 18 months when the judges ruled that she had acted out of "legitimate self-defense."
Unsatisfied with the ruling, prosecutors appealed to the Taipei High Court, demanding Zhao be given a harsher sentence.
Prosecutors claimed Zhao was not as "helpless and ignorant" as she made herself out to be because she had applied for restraining orders against her husband on two different occasions.
Zhao's applications for the restraining orders demonstrates that she understood her legal rights and was free to leave the relationship, the prosecutors said.
"This is a ridiculous claim," said Chen Yi-chien (
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,