An April circular by the Chinese Ministry of Education on student admission criteria at Tibetan universities has been harrowing and discriminating to say the least. The circular said that prospective students must state their “political attitude and ideological morality” to be considered for admission. It also said that students should not be involved in religious movements and students who are proficient in Marxist theory should be preferred. Since Beijing started occupying Tibet, it has meticulously introduced policies to dismantle the Tibetan education system, which is closely tied to its rich monastic tradition, and has even pulled students from Afghanistan and eastern Europe to Tibet. Initially, Beijing mainly targeted primary education, including by preventing Tibetans to even linger near monastic institutes, and it continues to do so to this day. Now Beijing’s attention has shifted toward higher education, and it is launching a relentless attack on universities, including through policy changes that highlight its negligence toward authentic Tibetan education, with the ultimate goal of depriving Tibetans of their identity and language. The initial attack on the Tibetan education system began during the Cultural Revolution, when the monastic system, recognized as the cornerstone of Tibet’s education system, was wiped out in terms of its physical structure and personnel. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) seized on this vacuum to indoctrinate and culturally assimilate Tibetans. Dawa Norbu, a former professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, wrote in his book Tibet: The Road Ahead that he and many other young Tibetans during the initial years of Chinese occupation were forcefully indoctrinated. The CCP was to an extent successful, but its strategy proved to be a double-edged sword, as Tibetans now know that they are different from Chinese. The end of the Cultural Revolution set the stage for the renaissance of Tibetan education. Great lamas and academics were
Opinion polls show that Taiwan’s judicial system and law enforcement “enjoy” low approval ratings among Taiwanese. In spite of data showing low crime rates, many Taiwanese drivers have faced aggressive driving, unprovoked road rage, road blocking and unmotivated police officers. Some criminals seem to consider themselves above the law, which is not completely wrong. Reports about so-called “road blocking” can be found in newspapers or on YouTube. An example of this is when “road rowdies” block a vehicle on a road, get out of their vehicle and start to attack the occupants of the blocked vehicle — often attacking in a group or with baseball bats. The victims might attempt to defend themselves and hit back. After police arrive, the rowdies act as witnesses for each other and tell the police that they were the ones defending themselves — sometimes with arrogant smiles on their faces. When they first question the victims, police often try to convince them to settle the case by paying some “mercy money” to the road rowdies to keep crime numbers low and avoid writing long reports. In my professional and private experience, some police officers might use unprofessional tactics and “soft force” on the victims. When officers first question them, the victims are still feeling distressed after a humiliating attack — possibly in front their family or others, and often in front of bystanders, who did not help, but might have recorded the incident. The victims, having expected law enforcement to help them, might consider the officers’ actions to be a second humiliation, or simply cooperation between police and criminals. A tool that the police might use to convince the victims is Article 87, Nos. 1 and 2 of the Social Order Maintenance Act (社會秩序維護法), which stipulates a fine of up to NT$18,000 for fighting. If the victims defends themselves,
The Ministry of Health and Welfare on June 2 posted a graphic on its Facebook account that mistakenly showed 11,366,748 cumulative confirmed COVID-19 cases instead of 2,198,161. Although it was quickly replaced, people who had downloaded the false image shared it on social media. This error should be reviewed, as it is a matter of public interest and undermined the credibility of public health information. Social media editors at government agencies should long ago have been given publication guidelines to address issues that go beyond minor glitches, such as posting incorrect graphics. On June 10, the Washington Post dismissed Felicia Sonmez, a reporter covering the White House, the US Congress and elections. In 2018, it had barred Sonmez from reporting on the nomination hearing of US Supreme Court Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was accused of sexual assault, on the grounds of conflict of interest. Sonmez said this was because she had come forward as a victim of sexual abuse, but her employer said she had advocated for sexual abuse victims, which might cause her to be biased when reporting on the case. Soon after basketball star Kobe Bryant died in a helicopter crash in 2020, Sonmez posted a link on Twitter to a report about a 2016 incident in which Bryant was accused of rape. The Washington Post’s editors said Sonmez had shown a lack of judgement that undermined the work of her colleagues, and placed her on administrative leave, but soon reinstated her. Last year, the newspaper allowed Sonmez to cover stories concerning sexual assault, but she went on criticizing her employer on Twitter. Sonmez sued the Washington Post and several of its editors for discrimination, but her suit was dismissed in March. Should news media workers’ behavior on social media be regulated, and if so, what should be regulated and
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Last week, Microsoft said it would stop selling software that guesses a person’s mood by looking at their face. The reason was that it could be discriminatory, it said. Computer vision software, which is used in self-driving vehicles and facial recognition, has long had issues with errors that come at the expense of women and people of color. Microsoft’s decision to halt the system entirely is one way of dealing with the problem, but there is another, novel approach that tech firms are exploring: training artificial intelligence (AI) on “synthetic” images to make it less biased. The idea is a bit like training pilots. Instead of practicing in unpredictable, real-world conditions, most spend hundreds of hours using flight simulators designed to cover a broad array of scenarios they could experience in the air. A similar approach is being taken to train AI, which relies on carefully labeled data to work properly. Until recently, the software used to recognize people has been trained on thousands or millions of images of real people, but that can be time-consuming, invasive and neglectful of large swathes of the population. Now many AI makers are using fake or “synthetic” images to train computers on a broader array of people, skin tones, ages or other features, essentially flipping the notion that fake data is bad. In fact, if used properly it will not only make software more trustworthy, but completely transform the economics of data as the “new oil.” In 2015, Internet entrepreneur Simi Lindgren came up with the idea for a Web site called Yuty to sell beauty products for all skin types. She wanted to use AI to recommend skincare products by analyzing selfies, but training a system to do that accurately was difficult. A popular database of 70,000 licensed faces from Flickr, for instance, was not
As midnight struck on June 30, 1997, and Hong Kong transitioned from British to Chinese rule, pro-democracy then-Hong Kong lawmaker Lee Wing-tat (李永達) stood with colleagues on the balcony of the territory’s Legislative Council, holding a defiant protest. Hong Kong is to mark the 25th anniversary of the handover tomorrow, and the halfway point of “one country, two systems” — the governance model agreed by the UK and China under which the territory would keep some autonomy and freedoms. That model was set to last 50 years, but even in its first hours, battle lines that would define Hong Kong’s politics for the next two decades were drawn. Furious at outgoing Hong Kong governor Chris Patten’s last-gasp attempts at democratization, China had announced that any legislator who had openly supported the measures would be thrown out. So the minute the handover became effective, Lee and many of his colleagues became seatless, but remained within the legislature to protest their expulsion. Other opposition figures went to the handover ceremony to show goodwill, but returned to join the rally later. “This is a moment when all Chinese people should feel proud,” then-Hong Kong lawmaker Martin Lee (李柱銘), founder of the territory’s Democratic Party, said in a speech at the time. “We hope Hong Kong and China can progress together.” Lee Wing-tat had more mixed feelings. “We were no longer that optimistic and I no longer believed we would have full-fledged democracy,” he told reporters. Twenty-five years later, there are no opposition lawmakers left in the legislature at all. Many have been arrested under a National Security Law Beijing imposed in 2020 or disqualified from standing for office under new “patriots-only” electoral rules. Others have fled — including Lee Wing-tat, who now lives in Britain. Like many, Lee Wing-tat was hopeful in 1984, when the Sino-British Joint Declaration laid the path to
The Jumbo Floating Restaurant was a landmark in Hong Kong for nearly half a century. The palatial restaurant, with its pastiche Chinese architecture and neon lights perfectly encapsulated the territory’s beguiling balance of East and West, tradition and modernity. It was a feature backdrop in numerous Hong Kong films. However, forced to close amid the stringent COVID-19 lockdown policies of Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam (林鄭月娥) and denied financial support from her government, the floating temple to Cantonese gastronomy was towed from its mooring in Aberdeen Harbour this month by its owners with its planned destination not released. On June 19, the vessel reportedly encountered inclement weather and “capsized” near the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島) in the South China Sea, the owners said. It might be regarded as fitting that a restaurant specializing in seafood cuisine would have its final resting place among the exotic fish and crustaceans that once graced its tables, but the Jumbo’s demise is also a metaphor for Hong Kong’s sinking fortunes and the hastening erosion of the former colony’s unique identity as it prepares to mark 25 years since its return to China on July 1, 1997. Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, who presided over the handover, has said that the territory’s residents enjoyed significantly more freedom under British rule than they do under the Chinese Communist Party. An exodus of talent and young people is under way. Britain last year granted 97,000 residency applications to Hong Kong holders of British National, Overseas passports. Large numbers are also emigrating to other countries, particularly Australia and Canada. In Taiwan, the National Immigration Agency last year granted residence permits to 11,000 Hong Kongers. The territory last year lost nearly 90,000 of its population of 7.5 million and more than 100,000 headed for the exits in February and
After years of deliberation, planning, coordination, legislation and recruitment, a highly anticipated new Cabinet-level agency, the Ministry of Digital Affairs, was approved by the Legislative Yuan in December last year and is to be formally established and start operations next month. Officially, the ministry is tasked with covering five sectors: information, telecommunications, media communications, cybersecurity and the Internet. Part of the new ministry’s responsibility is the establishment of digital infrastructure to support policy areas, including information security protection, wireless and broadband communications, and the digitization of government. However, its most important mission is to bring to bear the full might and resources of a Cabinet-level agency to advocate, advance and facilitate the development of industry segments in which Taiwan is generally considered to be less competitive globally. These are data, information technology services, software, media content and digital content. Focusing on the data industry, the idea that it is the “21st century’s oil” has become widely accepted. In the digital economy, user data and content can be exploited to enhance the efficiency of day-to-day operations. This is evident in that four of the world’s five most valuable companies by market capitalization heavily exploit user data to improve the quality of their products and services, and to increase their competitiveness. In Taiwan, the concept of a “data economy” has been prevalent since President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) first term in office. For the past couple of years, the government has made some effort to facilitate a data economy, including by promulgating personal privacy protection regulations, opening up government-owned non-personal data, developing data de-identification technologies, and standardizing formats and protocols for data sharing. However, the cumulative progress so far has not been as impressive as expected, despite vibrant data analytics and the constant emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) start-ups. A major thrust in a data economy is enabling multiple data
During his trip to the US at the beginning of the month, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) was asked about his position on the so-called “1992 consensus.” Chu said that the cross-Taiwan Strait political formula is a “no-consensus consensus” and a form of “created ambiguity” between the two sides. He was immediately rebuffed by China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, which said in a statement that “the 1992 consensus is not permitted to be arbitrarily distorted, [Chu] must maintain a clear head and keep to the correct direction.” Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) set the tone in 2019 when he said that “the 1992 consensus means ‘one country, two systems,’” leaving absolutely no ambiguity or room for consensus. How is Chu’s “created ambiguity” somehow further distorting or fabricating anything? A think tank affiliated with the KMT recently conducted an opinion poll on the cross-strait relationship, as well as Taiwan’s relations with the US and Japan. In response to the question: “Should Taiwan enter into a dialogue with China based upon the 1992 consensus?” 26 percent of respondents answered “yes” and 37 percent said “no.” KMT Legislator Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安), who has been touted as a potential candidate for Taipei mayor, on Saturday said that communication between the two sides is more important than adhering to the “consensus.” With the nine-in-one elections set for November, the results of the KMT’s own opinion polling and Chang’s statement indicate the party is now fully aware that it can no longer continue to blindly endorse the “consensus.” It knows it is time to drop the charade. However, it is unclear how former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) will respond. The idea of the “1992 consensus” originated at Hong Kong talks in 1992 between China’s Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits (ARATS) and Taiwan’s Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF), mainly to discuss practical issues
The Padma Multipurpose Bridge, which was inaugurated on Saturday last week, straddles the Padma River and is Bangladesh’s longest. The project has punctured the lies of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda machine. China claims that the bridge is the result of a “glorious collaboration” between the two countries, but Bangladesh has said that the four-lane rail bridge was independently funded by its government and private enterprises. Beijing had sought to promote the bridge as among the fruit of its Belt and Road Initiative, but the Bangladeshi Ministry of Foreign Affairs last week said that no foreign funds were used to complete the project, which is an initiative of Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wazed. The ministry said that Chinese involvement was limited to an engineering team, which provided assistance with the design. It emphasized that the Chinese team was not the only engineering team working on the project. Bangladesh’s politics is dominated by two main political factions, the pro-India Awami League, established by the “founding father of Bangladesh” Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, founded by military officer Ziaur Rahman. Observers describe Bangladeshi politics as a war between two women: Hasina, who is Mujibur Rahman’s daughter, and former Bangladeshi prime minister Khaleda Zia, Ziaur Rahman’s wife. Indian officials and think tanks universally support Hasina, on account of her family’s close relationship with India. Since independence, Bangladesh has, with the support of New Delhi, stepped out of the shadow of Pakistan’s influence. Since Hasina took office, Bangladesh-India ties have been close and positive. While Bangladesh is a participant in the Belt and Road Initiative and is a member of Beijing’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, its government has pushed back against China’s “wolf warrior” diplomats. For example, after China praised Bangladesh’s “wise decision” to decline to join the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) and “dance to the
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On Saturday, 80-year-old Paul McCartney headlined Glastonbury, the UK’s premier live music festival. In Hyde Park, the Rolling Stones, fronted by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, both 78, strutted their stuff. Other touring rockers included Bruce Springsteen (72), Elton John (75) and, of course, Bob Dylan (81), who is on an optimistically conceived “never ending tour.” This refusal to fade away is not confined to wrinkly rockers. The best new book I have read recently is Leadership: Six Studies in Strategy by 99-year-old Henry Kissinger. Rupert Murdoch is back on the marriage market at 91 and former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is hoping to make a political comeback at 72. These days more older people are not so much raging against the dying of the light as continuing with business as usual well into what used to be regarded as the twilight years. Our youth-obsessed culture has always underestimated the enduring power of older people. Ray Kroc was in his 50s when he began building the McDonald’s franchise system while Colonel Harland Sanders was 62 when he franchised the formula for Kentucky Fried Chicken. C.M. “Dad” Joiner, a legendary Texas wildcatter, did not hit the big one until he was 70, when he sank his last few dollars into a makeshift drilling rig. George Mitchell did not crack the secret of fracking — an innovation that has revolutionized the world’s energy industry — until he was in his 80s. A study of new US firms conducted by the Kauffman Foundation discovered the highest rate of entrepreneurial activity among people aged 55 to 64 and the lowest rate among those aged 20 to 30. This obsession is particularly silly now that 80 is the new 40 — or in McCartney’s case, 30. Over the past 200 years, life expectancy has increased at a steady rate of
As the night train to Kyiv clattered through the darkness, some of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s team were worried. The EU’s most high-profile official was chatting to reporters drinking beer in the luxury car at the back of the train. The aides were fretting about how member states would react to a gesture designed to pressure them into opening the door to Ukraine, a person with knowledge of their thinking said. EU leaders had refused to make Ukraine a candidate for membership at Versailles near Paris in March, but less than two weeks after Von der Leyen visited Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Kyiv this month, he was dialing in to another summit to thank the bloc for starting the membership process. The decision to make Ukraine an official candidate, alongside Moldova, hints at a more assertive EU, embracing countries on its eastern flank regardless of the threat posed by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s vision of the historic Russian empire. Von der Leyen has learned the lessons of past crises, when the EU paid a high price for dithering and is now seizing a moment when taboo after taboo has been cast aside, one senior EU official said. However, there are broader risks to the strategy. It was the prospect of closer relations between Kyiv and the EU that prompted Putin to intervene in Ukraine in 2014, when his forces annexed the Crimean Peninsula, and the Russian leader has referenced the expansion of NATO to his borders before the invasion of Ukraine in February. FUEL FACTOR Indeed, in the days before the candidacy decision, Moscow made steep cuts to the gas supplies to Europe, setting alarm bells ringing in Germany, where the country’s industry is particularly reliant on Russian fuel. Officials are braced for further retaliation and Von der Leyen might be reaching the limit of how
Most Taiwanese companies used to prioritize labor costs when deciding where to set up new factories. With more countries launching carbon border taxes or collecting carbon fees in an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, some local firms feel that those offering a low carbon emission environment might be a better choice for building new operations. As it is a major challenge to significantly reduce carbon emissions overnight, manufacturers have to carefully calculate their cost structure as carbon tax, or carbon charges, could outweigh labor costs. Taiwanese exports to the EU are soon to be charged a carbon border tax, as the economic bloc in March backed a plan to levy carbon emission tariffs on imports that create greenhouse gases for a three-year transition period starting next year. The plan is expected to be fully approved by the fall. Paying for carbon emissions, or carbon content, is an inexorable global trend. There are 68 direct carbon pricing instruments operating worldwide, including 36 carbon taxes and 32 emission trading systems, a report released last month by the World Bank said. In addition to cost considerations, it has become a key factor for local manufacturers when acquiring new supply contracts, as a growing number of multinational companies — including Apple Inc, Google parent company Alphabet Inc and Microsoft Corp — have pledged to achieve zero carbon emissions. As the greenhouse gas emissions from their supply chain partners would also count toward these companies’ emissions goals, sustainable suppliers would be their top choice. That means companies without plans to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions could soon risk losing orders. GlobalWafers Co, the world’s third-largest silicon wafer supplier, said reducing wafer travel is an effective way to reduce carbon footprints and is a key factor when the company is choosing where to build a new factory worth
What does it feel like to fight for someone else’s land, which has been occupied by their enemy, while your homeland is under occupation? What is the logic and motive behind this decision? Kavsar Kurash turns 24 this year. He and his mother are US residents. He left the US four years ago to attend college in Sweden. He applied to enlist with the foreigners fighting for Ukraine when the war began. He said that he might not be able to do too much for them, but he could do great things for himself: He could put his conscience to rest, and sleep peacefully at night. Kurash was refused because of his lack of military experience. He went anyway, and arrived in the Ukrainian city of Lviv on April 1, with the idea that “if I can carry a wounded man out of a building that explodes or I can carry a bowl of food to a refugee, that is enough.” Distributing foreign aid was a major daily task for him. To know the real reason of Kavsar’s journey of Ukraine, I called the boy myself, as a family friend. “Of course, we do support you to help others, but in international affairs, we Uighurs are not obliged to do so,” I said, trying to remind him of his motherland. He responded that, since the Uighurs are a people waiting for help from the international community, if Uighurs help people who share the same destiny, help will come from God if it does not come from within or from the international community. I asked him whether he knew that there are people in the world in an even worse situation than the Ukrainians are in. “Of course,” he said, “but this is the only available zone I can reach today, so
I have just discovered that I never really existed, at least as far as the goons in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are concerned. In their latest effort to turn Hong Kong into a police state — it can only be a matter of time before a tear gas shell or a Taser replaces the bauhinia flower as the city’s emblem — the Chinese authorities have taken further steps to throttle the education system. For communists, education is above all about engineering the soul. So, the CCP has now gotten rid of any school textbooks that might tell the truth about Hong Kong’s past and its aspirations. The CCP has even gone so far as to deny that Hong Kong was ever a British colony; it was simply an occupied territory, apparently. No colony means no governor, a post I held from 1992 until Hong Kong’s handover to Chinese rule five years later. When I left Hong Kong, I noted that no one at the end of the 20th century would want to justify colonial rule. However, one cannot deny that it existed in Hong Kong from the 1840s onward, with the UK acquiring part of the territory via grants and part of it on a 99-year lease. The city’s incoming chief executive, John Lee (李家超), knows this perfectly well. He served as a police officer under British colonial governors like me and must have sworn an oath to the colony’s government. Although they lived in a colony, Hong Kong’s residents enjoyed far more freedom under British rule than they now do under Chinese communism. That is why many of them are fleeing the city and why many regard themselves as Hong Kongers or Hong Kong Chinese rather than simply Chinese. Opinion polls that highlight this fact would of course be stopped or censored. Lee
The dual impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have driven the costs of raw materials up globally, including for electricity and fuel. In the past, the price of electricity in Taiwan has been lowered in response to declines in the international cost of fuel, so it is reasonable to adjust the price of electricity when there is a major increase in fuel costs. Apart from international fuel costs, another problem with Taiwan’s electricity pricing is that it does not fully account for environmental costs. Taiwan relies on imports for 97.4 percent of its energy, but the price of electricity in Taiwan is cheaper than some countries that have their own energy sources. Taiwan Cement Corp chairman Nelson Chang (張安平) on Wednesday last week said that electricity prices in other countries are higher than those in Taiwan. The environmental and social costs of unreasonable electricity prices are borne by the entire population. The need to rationalize electricity prices has been the consensus at yearly National Energy Conference sessions, and it must be faced on the nation’s path to net zero carbon emissions. ECONOMIC BENEFITS Energy transition is not just an environmental issue, but also an economic one. Industries that fail to respond to the worldwide trend of energy transition will be eliminated. Many companies in Taiwan have already got on board this trend by pledging to obtain a large portion of their energy from renewable sources. Reducing subsidies for fossil fuels would have a positive effect on the development of new energy sources and on the energy management industry. This makes rationalizing electricity prices all the more important from the perspective of economic development. Some people blame the need to rationalize electricity prices on the government’s nuclear policy, but that is a mistake. Setting aside the likely additional cost of processing nuclear waste, consider
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Thirty years ago, Democratic political strategist James Carville focused Bill Clinton’s US presidential campaign with the mantra, “It’s the economy, stupid.” The US had just experienced a relatively brief, mild recession, owing partly to sharply rising oil prices following Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. Between the slow recovery and Ross Perot’s independent candidacy — which peeled votes away from then-president George H.W. Bush — the stage was set for a Clinton victory. Today, the US’ job market remains resilient, with healthy job creation, low unemployment and almost two job openings for every unemployed person, but dangerously high inflation has left Americans deeply dissatisfied with the economy. At 8.6 percent as of last month, the annual consumer-price-index inflation rate is quadruple the norm of the past few decades, and has outpaced wage growth, leaving most families with falling real incomes. Even core inflation — which excludes volatile food and energy prices — is running at 6 percent, higher than in other major economies. No one under 60 has experienced anything like this in their adult life. Worse, the odds of a recession are growing. Housing starts and retail sales are stalling, and stock and bond markets — imperfect predictors, to be sure — are signaling problems ahead. There is little monetary or fiscal policy ammunition left to deal with a recession, and the fiscal profligacy of the past three administrations has left the country poorly equipped to address exploding social security and Medicare spending costs, not to mention the now-apparent need for more defense spending. With the US Federal Reserve now raising its target interest rate, inflation might ease heading into next year, but a lag in the effects of higher rates, combined with rising inflation expectations — according to consumer surveys and the bond market — suggests that it could be some time to
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