It’s a sad day when corruption reaches the level where school principals are apparently stealing food from the mouths of babes.
In an investigation in New Taipei City (新北市), prosecutors from the Banciao District Prosecutors’ Office are probing the dealings of more than 10 elementary-school principals who reportedly accepted kickbacks to give good reviews to lunch vendors that supply between 80 and 90 percent of the city’s elementary schools.
In some cases, prosecutors said, vendors were bribing principals with up to NT$300,000 per semester.
The vendors were reportedly bribing principals to give them better evaluations than they would normally have received based on the quality of their lunches, enabling them to make more successful bids to supply other schools.
If these allegations are true, these bribes could have far-reaching effects on the health of pupils in New Taipei City.
In order to cut costs so they could pay these bribes, lunch vendors likely made deals with the least expensive farmers’ associations they could find, which in turn likely sourced the cheapest food from dubious food companies in the nation’s industrial heartland. The most likely end result of this chain of cost cutting is that food companies used substandard food, while farmers’ associations provided produce containing all kinds of harmful chemical pesticide and fertilizer residues.
However, despite the low-quality, sometimes toxic nature of this food, the whole chain of suppliers could still obtain Council of Agriculture certification. Could it have something to do with these bribes? Could these food vendors have been using their squeaky clean, paid-for evaluations to help their suppliers apply for council certification?
These questions need to be asked, especially after almost one-fifth of school lunches failed nutritional safety tests in a Consumer Protection Commission study.
The commission said that in a test in September, it found chloramphenicol — a chemical that causes severe blood problems such as anemia, low blood platelet counts, low white cell counts and leukemia — in some school lunches. The commission added that two samples of food containing unusually high levels of chloramphenicol and another banned pesticide bore Certified Agricultural Standard (CAS) approval labels.
That’s curious. How did the council go about granting these food vendors certification if they were selling toxic food?
In another case in May, education officials in New Taipei City found that chicken being given to students was tainted with a banned chemical, but had carried the CAS label. The chemical was an antibiotic called doxycycline, which can cause permanent skin sensitivity and thinness and is especially dangerous for children.
These cases are not just about officials taking money that didn’t belong to them; it is about failure to protect the health of children.
In all likelihood, principals taking bribes to give good grades to lunch vendors led to students eating sub-standard food, some tainted with toxic chemicals. The good grades from the schools probably had a knock-on effect, allowing the food companies that sold produce to those lunch vendors to apply for CAS status.
Children are especially sensitive to the types of toxic waste that was found in their food. Those responsible should be held accountable to the highest degree.
In their recent op-ed “Trump Should Rein In Taiwan” in Foreign Policy magazine, Christopher Chivvis and Stephen Wertheim argued that the US should pressure President William Lai (賴清德) to “tone it down” to de-escalate tensions in the Taiwan Strait — as if Taiwan’s words are more of a threat to peace than Beijing’s actions. It is an old argument dressed up in new concern: that Washington must rein in Taipei to avoid war. However, this narrative gets it backward. Taiwan is not the problem; China is. Calls for a so-called “grand bargain” with Beijing — where the US pressures Taiwan into concessions
The term “assassin’s mace” originates from Chinese folklore, describing a concealed weapon used by a weaker hero to defeat a stronger adversary with an unexpected strike. In more general military parlance, the concept refers to an asymmetric capability that targets a critical vulnerability of an adversary. China has found its modern equivalent of the assassin’s mace with its high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) weapons, which are nuclear warheads detonated at a high altitude, emitting intense electromagnetic radiation capable of disabling and destroying electronics. An assassin’s mace weapon possesses two essential characteristics: strategic surprise and the ability to neutralize a core dependency.
Chinese President and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Xi Jinping (習近平) said in a politburo speech late last month that his party must protect the “bottom line” to prevent systemic threats. The tone of his address was grave, revealing deep anxieties about China’s current state of affairs. Essentially, what he worries most about is systemic threats to China’s normal development as a country. The US-China trade war has turned white hot: China’s export orders have plummeted, Chinese firms and enterprises are shutting up shop, and local debt risks are mounting daily, causing China’s economy to flag externally and hemorrhage internally. China’s
During the “426 rally” organized by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party under the slogan “fight green communism, resist dictatorship,” leaders from the two opposition parties framed it as a battle against an allegedly authoritarian administration led by President William Lai (賴清德). While criticism of the government can be a healthy expression of a vibrant, pluralistic society, and protests are quite common in Taiwan, the discourse of the 426 rally nonetheless betrayed troubling signs of collective amnesia. Specifically, the KMT, which imposed 38 years of martial law in Taiwan from 1949 to 1987, has never fully faced its
RSS