It’s official now — smoking in public spaces is illegal. The new law, which came into effect on Sunday, will clear up the air and hopefully encourage some to abandon a harmful habit that costs billions of dollars in healthcare and work absenteeism every year.
Laudable though the new law may be, there were signs on Sunday that the authorities may be overreaching after the Taipei City Government encouraged the public to report any violations by providing name, time, date and location — and pictures — while promising 5 percent of the fines as a reward.
In other words, the government was telling us that it is OK to spy on each other and to snitch on friends, family members and coworkers.
“I think most of the monetary rewards will go to those who report someone they know, such as a coworker or friend,” Chang Kang-hsin (張康興), a Taipei City Health Department inspector said at the time.
Now there is nothing wrong with a civilian reporting a serious crime — murder, rape or other serious offenses — or with the state providing financial compensation for their cooperation. But a policy encouraging people to report individuals who violate a smoking ban is another question altogether, especially when it comes with a financial incentive at a time when thousands of people are being laid off or forced to take unpaid leave. Furthermore, while some may be motivated by money, it wouldn’t take too long before less scrupulous individuals use this for other motives, such as vengeance, jealousy or any other grievance.
Petty motives aside, when a government invites citizens to spy on each other, it is on a very slippery slope. Not that the current government is breaking new ground in this department; after all, not so long ago the Environmental Protection Administration was offering similar incentives to encourage people to report those who failed to recycle or littered public spaces. In 2002, the US Department of Justice launched an initiative known as Terrorism Information and Prevention System (with the appropriate acronym TIPS), which enlisted people from all walks of life to work as “extra eyes” for the government.
What should make all of us step back, however, is that once citizen spies become a fact of life, there is no telling where it will end — especially when a government has authoritarian tendencies. Today it’s cigarettes and failure to recycle a plastic bottle; tomorrow, it could be anything — business practices, sexual behavior, political views. Spying is made perfectly legal, we would think, because it was sanctioned by the government, the infamous top-down directive that throughout history has resulted in untold abuse.
In darker periods of history, the KGB, the Gestapo and the Stasi all encouraged people to snitch on each other, ostensibly to “protect” the state. Given where these agencies — and the governments they worked for — are today, it should be clear that the practice, though seemingly effective at first, is in the long term deleterious as it turns citizens against each other, undermines trust and unweaves the bonds that make society function. Those reviled agencies, we should note, pushed citizen spying to a terrible extreme, but they did so gradually, just as the proverbial frog will allow itself to be boiled to death if the temperature is raised one degree at a time.
Encouraging people to quit smoking is one thing, a good one at that. But such efforts should not unleash measures that cause more harm than the ill they seek to remedy.
On Monday, the day before Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) departed on her visit to China, the party released a promotional video titled “Only with peace can we ‘lie flat’” to highlight its desire to have peace across the Taiwan Strait. However, its use of the expression “lie flat” (tang ping, 躺平) drew sarcastic comments, with critics saying it sounded as if the party was “bowing down” to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Amid the controversy over the opposition parties blocking proposed defense budgets, Cheng departed for China after receiving an invitation from the CCP, with a meeting with
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) is leading a delegation to China through Sunday. She is expected to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in Beijing tomorrow. That date coincides with the anniversary of the signing of the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA), which marked a cornerstone of Taiwan-US relations. Staging their meeting on this date makes it clear that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) intends to challenge the US and demonstrate its “authority” over Taiwan. Since the US severed official diplomatic relations with Taiwan in 1979, it has relied on the TRA as a legal basis for all
In the event of a war with China, Taiwan has some surprisingly tough defenses that could make it as difficult to tackle as a porcupine: A shoreline dotted with swamps, rocks and concrete barriers; conscription for all adult men; highways and airports that are built to double as hardened combat facilities. This porcupine has a soft underbelly, though, and the war in Iran is exposing it: energy. About 39,000 ships dock at Taiwan’s ports each year, more than the 30,000 that transit the Strait of Hormuz. About one-fifth of their inbound tonnage is coal, oil, refined fuels and liquefied natural gas (LNG),
Taiwan ranks second globally in terms of share of population with a higher-education degree, with about 60 percent of Taiwanese holding a post-secondary or graduate degree, a survey by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development showed. The findings are consistent with Ministry of the Interior data, which showed that as of the end of last year, 10.602 million Taiwanese had completed post-secondary education or higher. Among them, the number of women with graduate degrees was 786,000, an increase of 48.1 percent over the past decade and a faster rate of growth than among men. A highly educated population brings clear advantages.
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