These days virtually everything happening has some connection with winning votes for the Dec. 1 election. For this reason, local governments are hard at work ensuring that there are public displays about "your tax dollar at work" -- one reason that so many long-overdue sidewalk and road repairs are being carried out now. This is also why the Taipei City Council has just passed some very stringent regulations covering the Internet cafe industry.
That laws are enacted with ulterior motives should come as no surprise. But at least the laws should deal effectively with the problems they were designed to address. This is hardly the case with the new Taipei City ordinance.
As Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (
According to the new regulations, Internet cafes in Taipei will have to be located at least 200m away from primary, junior high and senior high schools -- as if that distance would prove to be an obstacle. And since children under age 15 can only enter Internet cafes if accompanied by a parent, what is the point of banning cafes within 200m of primary and junior high schools?
Then there is the requirement that all Internet cafes must be located on streets that are at least 8m wide. Quite how this will discourage patronage, we cannot imagine.
Many Internet cafes will, however, have to shut down, since it is very difficult to find locations that aren't within a stone's throw of some kind of school, especially in downtown Taipei, and main street locations are very expensive. Perhaps that is what the City Council had in mind all along. Rather than giving youngsters the incentive to exercise self-discipline or trying to ensure that parents provide some guidance, council members simply want to make it impossible for the cafes to survive.
Some of the new rules are more reasonable -- especially the ones regulating the materials that youngsters can come into contact with at the cafes. But these provisions require diligent enforcement and monitoring. In view of Ma's predilection for short-lived but well-publicized enforcement campaigns, we cannot imagine that a long-running monitoring effort can be successfully mounted.
Internet cafes can provide a healthy and creative outlet for youngsters, something that is sorely lacking not only in Taipei but in the rest of Taiwan as well. They can serve as an escape valve or a haven for youngsters facing problems at home or at school. Shutting down these cafes does not mean that all the youngsters spending time at such places will just go home.
Closing Internet cafes will also not stop the predilection of adolescents for "hanging out." The question is, therefore, how deleterious to them hanging out in Internet cafes might be compared with the other options at hand -- KTVs or pool halls or drag-racing on city streets.
The lack of common sense and detachment from the real world shown in the drafting of these new bylaws is proof that virtual reality exists not only on computer screens, but in the legal code of Taipei City. Perhaps voters should be wondering more about the legal fantasies dreamed up by their elected representatives than worried about what alternative universes their children might be exploring via the Internet.
As it has striven toward superiority in most measures of the Asian military balance, China is now ready to challenge the undersea balance of power, long dominated by the United States, a decisive advantage crucial to its ability to deter blockade and invasion of Taiwan by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). America expended enormous treasure to develop the technology, logistics, training, and personnel to emerge victorious in the Cold War undersea struggle against the former Soviet Union, and to remain superior today; the US is not used to considering the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN)
The annual summit of East Asia and other events around the ASEAN summit in October and November every year have become the most important gathering of leaders in the Indo-Pacific region. This year, as Laos is the chair of ASEAN, it was privileged to host all of the ministerial and summit meetings associated with ASEAN. Besides the main summit, this included the high-profile East Asia Summit, ASEAN summits with its dialogue partners and the ASEAN Plus Three Summit with China, Japan and South Korea. The events and what happens around them have changed over the past 15 years from a US-supported, ASEAN-led
Lately, China has been inviting Taiwanese influencers to travel to China’s Xinjiang region to make films, weaving a “beautiful Xinjiang” narrative as an antidote to the international community’s criticisms by creating a Potemkin village where nothing is awry. Such manipulations appear harmless — even compelling enough for people to go there — but peeling back the shiny veneer reveals something more insidious, something that is hard to ignore. These films are not only meant to promote tourism, but also harbor a deeper level of political intentions. Xinjiang — a region of China continuously listed in global human rights reports —
President William Lai’s (賴清德) first Double Ten National Day address had two strategic goals. For domestic affairs, the speech aimed to foster consensus on national identity, strengthen the country and unite the Taiwanese against a Chinese invasion. In terms of cross-strait relations, the speech aimed to mitigate tensions in the Taiwan Strait and promote the coexistence and prosperity of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in China and the Republic of China (ROC). Lai is taking a different stance from previous Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administrations on domestic political issues. During his speech, he said: “The PRC could not be the
RSS