Recently, a dining controversy has caused an uproar on the Internet. On Saturday last week, 27 students from the Department of Information and Finance Management of National Taipei University of Technology went to a stir-fry restaurant after a summer camp. Before being served the dishes they ordered, they wolfed down two pots of free rice, and asked the owner to bring more rice. As rice needed time to cook, the owner suggested that they order stir-fried noodles instead, which the students blankly refused. They left before the new round they ordered of rice was ready to eat.
Even though the students did not make a scene at the restaurant, they gave the restaurant one-star reviews, and wrote about their “unfair” treatment.
Their complaints triggered a serious backlash. Internet users started speaking up for the owner and excoriated of the students’ behavior on the department’s fan page with a flood of comments. Under social pressure, the dean and the students went back to the restaurant to apologize to the owner.
However, they later complained that they were forced to do so by the school authorities, and that they felt disappointed with the school for not “protecting them” or hearing them out. As the controversy did not die down, the owner suspended operations.
Although this was a minor incident, it exposes several social issues. The first one is that some Taiwanese tend to exploit restaurants’ free food policy, as the “salmon chaos” incident in 2021 showed, when people changed their names to get free sushi, or when customers got so much food at all-you-can-eat buffets that they left behind mountains of leftovers.
It is apparent that the students wanted to exploit the policy instead of opting for alternatives such as stir-fried noodles.
To say that a place is civilized means more than just displaying fine art or skyscrapers. It also entails people’s manners and behavior, and this kind of greed is a flaw in the Taiwanese character.
The other issue is the problem with the review system. As people are now living in the digital age, information such as ratings and comments are open to the public on the Internet. Even though the review system was meant for feedback and comments, it has become a tool to threaten service providers for any detail.
Although customers have the right to give ratings, they should remember that mutual respect and empathy are still required for good dining experiences, and that paying money does not automatically make them superior. For many owners, the one-star rating might be more humiliating and infuriating than customers not paying for their meals.
As those who were involved in the incident were students, school authorities should also have let them take responsibility for their own behavior, instead of compelling them to apologize or apologizing on their behalf. Their interference in the incident not only did not remedy anything, but also led the students to resent them.
In an age where people can enjoy trolling and trash-talking on the Internet without consequences, many users are more than happy to treat conflict and complaints as a joke, and make malicious remarks instead of offering solutions or discovering the truth.
To put an end to the vicious cycle, the most important principle is to show others the respect that they deserve.
Donald Trump’s return to the White House has offered Taiwan a paradoxical mix of reassurance and risk. Trump’s visceral hostility toward China could reinforce deterrence in the Taiwan Strait. Yet his disdain for alliances and penchant for transactional bargaining threaten to erode what Taiwan needs most: a reliable US commitment. Taiwan’s security depends less on US power than on US reliability, but Trump is undermining the latter. Deterrence without credibility is a hollow shield. Trump’s China policy in his second term has oscillated wildly between confrontation and conciliation. One day, he threatens Beijing with “massive” tariffs and calls China America’s “greatest geopolitical
Ahead of US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) meeting today on the sidelines of the APEC summit in South Korea, an op-ed published in Time magazine last week maliciously called President William Lai (賴清德) a “reckless leader,” stirring skepticism in Taiwan about the US and fueling unease over the Trump-Xi talks. In line with his frequent criticism of the democratically elected ruling Democratic Progressive Party — which has stood up to China’s hostile military maneuvers and rejected Beijing’s “one country, two systems” framework — Lyle Goldstein, Asia engagement director at the US think tank Defense Priorities, called
A large majority of Taiwanese favor strengthening national defense and oppose unification with China, according to the results of a survey by the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC). In the poll, 81.8 percent of respondents disagreed with Beijing’s claim that “there is only one China and Taiwan is part of China,” MAC Deputy Minister Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) told a news conference on Thursday last week, adding that about 75 percent supported the creation of a “T-Dome” air defense system. President William Lai (賴清德) referred to such a system in his Double Ten National Day address, saying it would integrate air defenses into a
The central bank has launched a redesign of the New Taiwan dollar banknotes, prompting questions from Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators — “Are we not promoting digital payments? Why spend NT$5 billion on a redesign?” Many assume that cash will disappear in the digital age, but they forget that it represents the ultimate trust in the system. Banknotes do not become obsolete, they do not crash, they cannot be frozen and they leave no record of transactions. They remain the cleanest means of exchange in a free society. In a fully digitized world, every purchase, donation and action leaves behind data.
RSS