Taiwan Matters!

Since the late 1990s the Taiwan government has introduced a series of reforms in the local education designed in part to eradicate the Chinese colonialist history that was the norm during the era of one-party rule. Among these were changes in the textbooks. An important change was permitting local schools to select their own textbooks, rather than forcing all schools to use one textbook. This has led to great local variation in education, as well as immense profits for textbook makers. It has also led to a much greater focus on the history and culture of Taiwan.

Mayor Hau Lung-bin of Taipei recently announced an attempt to erect a separate textbook kingdom in northern Taiwan, a little taste of what will happen in 2008 if Ma Ying-jeou wins.

Taipei City Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) came under fire yesterday from city councilors and student rights groups after he announced that a controversial "single version textbook" policy would take effect in the city in September 2008.
He also said that once the junior high school students educated under the new policy graduated in 2011, the city government, the Taipei County government, and the Keelung City government would jointly hold a new high school entrance examination for them.
The "single version textbook" policy requires schools to use specific textbooks edited by the government for every subject, in contrast to the current system that gives local schools the freedom to choose from a range of textbooks those that their students will use.

Hau denied that the purpose of the plan was to roll back the changes the DPP has made, but it can't be a coincidence that the areas named have traditionally been KMT strongholds where the Blues can count on control of the system to enforce their will. The Ministry of Education has already nixed the idea, but Hau has claimed the city government is not under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Education. This claim is not empty; Taiwan's arcane system recognizes several levels of government, counties and cities like Taichung county or Changhua city, and then provinces (like Taiwan island and its associated islands) and municipalities, which are technically equivalent. Taipei and Kaohsiung are municipalities, and are technically equivalent to the whole island of Taiwan, a "province". Hence the mayors of these two cities have enormous clout in the system and jurisdictions are not as clear as they might be.

Hau can also count on sympathy because many around the island feel that the DPP's textbook decision has resulted in "chaos." Parents claim that the quality of the textbooks has fallen (it certainly isn't high, and from what I can tell, wasn't ever very good). The Blues can count on this in their drive to roll back DPP progress if they win in '08.

[Taiwan]

Labels: education, Hau Lung-bin, Taipei

Still making unconvincing excuses

After two posts (on both INDIAC and Taiwan Matters!) about Catherine Gluck's very one-sided BBC article which failed to challenge the lies spoon-fed to her by Shih Ming-teh's crazed anti-democratic campaign in Taipei to "depose" the democratically-elected president of Taiwan, Chen Shui-bian, the BBC still hasn't posted any comments to the original article and is still pretending that they're trying hard to get it right.

I'm still not buying it.

Smoke and mirrors won't do
In response to my e-mail back to the BBC about the still-missing comments, I received another e-mail, this time from Samanthi Dissanayake. At first glance, the e-mail appears to display genuine concern and interest, but it takes only a slightly closer look to see a less attractive side.

Let's do a point-by-point analysis of Dissanayake's letter.

Dear Tim,

Thanks very much for your emails. I'm sorry that you didn't see any comments posted. Actually, when we put a postform on a story it is largely because we want to collect people's views and experiences for a more substantial piece - so it would amount to more than comments posted at the end of an article.

First, I didn't just "not see" any comments. They really weren't there! Next, what was Gluck's 31-paragraph article -- some kind of a "quick take"? It seems to have done "substantial" damage, nonetheless.

Dissanayake continues:

In this situation, we avoid putting comments up on the story immediately, because we want to use some of the best comments and people for a longer-form piece.

Again, she treats Gluck's article on an anti-democratic attempt to depose a democratically-elected president as relatively unimportant. The choice of the word "immediately" also rings hollow. A whole week has passed since Gluck's article -- practically an eternity in the news business -- and Shih's mendacious campaign of hate has been cheered on by Taiwan's pan-blue media for a whole month now. And while Dissanayake might want to save "some of the best comments," I'm confident that there were enough comments submitted to that article that they could have put up 40 or 50 without even touching "the best" ones.

Let's see what else she has to say about things which don't exist.

When we put up a debate that is also on the Have Your Say page, then we do have the ability to post up most of the comments sent in. Perhaps we should have done a debate in this instance.

As I already mentioned, there are exactly zero comments below the original article, and there are only four Asia stories on the "Have Your Say" page. (Continue reading to see about the "debate" part.)

I am very interested in doing some kind of piece on the political situation in Taiwan and this involves exactly the sort of conversations you recommend we have with people outside Taipei.

They just failed miserably at uncovering the truth about what's going on in Taiwan. They failed so badly, it looked like it was on purpose! Why would I trust them to do a better job this time? Does Dissanayake have special knowledge of Taiwan's situation that she can bring? What does she know about Taiwan? Anything that would let her write (or even edit) a serious piece on Taiwan politics? Let's check, shall we?

A Google search for [Samanthi Dissanayake Taiwan] only comes up with five hits, none of which seem to show that she has actually even written anything about Taiwan at all. Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, but those results are not too promising. Let's try an image search.

A Google image search for [Samanthi Dissanayake] brings up three hits, all related to Hong Kong.

Even using BBC's own search function to look for [Samanthi Dissanayake Taiwan] brings up nothing where she writes about Taiwan. Does the BBC expect to fix the damage done by an unquestioning reporter by replacing her with one who has no experience reporting on Taiwan, or are they doing it on purpose, expecting most people to not notice?

Further searching brought me to a page by someone who received a similar reply from Dissanayake, but the author of that post seems to have bought her story in the long run. I'm certainly more skeptical than that of the reasons for the unbalanced reports.

Getting back to her e-mail to me, she still fails to impress:

I will certainly be getting back to a number of people who emailed the debate to get a sense of their views. We are very eager to represent the variety of opinion there.

Wait! I thought she just said "we should have done a debate." And why is the part about "getting back to" these people still being stated in the future tense? She's already ignored them for an entire week.

Nearing the end of the e-mail, she's still ignoring the obvious:

I was wondering if you would also be willing to talk to me? Are you in Taiwan? What are you doing there?

This was contained in the bottom of her reply in the section which quoted my previous e-mail:
- - -
> >From: Tim Maddog
> >Email address: [myname] [at] hotmail [dot] com
> >Country: Taiwan
[...]
>Tim Maddog, Taiwan
- - -

Notice the extreme lack of attention to detail there. Does it look like she did a bit of skimming? Does she expect me to trust her to do an accurate piece on anything?

In closing, I get this:

I look forward to hearing from you.

Best wishes,

Samanthi
BBC News website

Be careful what you wish for. You might get an earful.

I think I will write back and let her read this post -- and this and this and this and this.

Details that need attention: Taiwan, 台灣, Taipei, 台北, Shih Ming-teh, 施明德, BBC, 英國廣播公司, Caroline Gluck, 凱若琳葛拉克, Samanthi Dissanayake

Cross-posted at It's Not Democracy, It's A Conspiracy!

Labels: BBC, Caroline Gluck, Samanth Dissanayake, Shih Ming-teh, Taipei, Tim Maddog, 凱若琳葛拉克, 台北, 施明德, 英國廣播公司

Is it on purpose?

A reader of [my personal blog] sent me a link yesterday afternoon to a very one-sided BBC article about Shih Ming-teh's inane protest in Taipei. Writer Caroline Gluck, despite being stationed right there in the capital, got so many things so glaringly wrong, I couldn't help but compose a long comment to the article.

An e-mail to fellow blogger Michael Turton revealed that both he and Jason of Wandering to Tamshui had submitted similar comments there, and all of us had done so independently of each other.

None of our comments has been published. In fact, no comments at all have.

Action, reaction
So Michael blogged it, Jason restated his own submission in comments to Michael's post, and I'm now going to reprint my own comment here [with two typos corrected, some links added so that anyone can verify the facts of the matter, and a bit of formatting]:

What the people quoted in this article say isn't necessarily true, and Ms. Gluck, you leave too many distortions unchallenged.

When Shih says "This whole island is angry," he implies that everyone is angry at President Chen. The fact is that many people in Taiwan are angry at Shih himself, as his own ethics are questionable. Shih's current connection with Chen Yu-hao, who is wanted internationally after fleeing justice with ~~hundreds of millions of NT$~~ NT$60 billion in debt and who now holds a Chinese passport, goes unmentioned.

When you tell readers about President Chen's "public approval ratings falling to all-time lows," you fail to tell them that the polls which say so were done by opposition newspapers like the United Daily News and the China Times which are known for telling obvious lies in their front page headlines. Also, you could point out that 80 - 90% of the news media in Taiwan is run by opponents of Chen Shui-bian, remnants of the KMT's party-state. Again, this is unfair and unbalanced "coverage" of a complex story.

Emile Sheng is constantly portrayed in the English-language media as a "neutral observer." He's given the space here to deceive readers with quotes like "We don't want any partisan support," but he's been anti-Chen for as long as I can remember. Sheng's employer, Soochow University, is curiously named after a place in China. Shih's movement has exactly the same goals as the unelected authoritarians in China: to use extralegal means get rid of the democratically-elected president of Taiwan. Taiwan, you might remind your readers, is an independent country where Chen's title doesn't need to be put in scare quotes the way it is in Xinhua reports.

You unquestioningly say that the red clothing demonstrates the protesters' "anger at corruption." Did you think to look behind the curtain and see if you could find evidence of China's connection to this event? Lin Cheng-chieh, the chairman of a pro-unification party who recently beat a Chen supporter on live TV, supports the movement, and he's connected to gang leaders in China such as Chang An-le. Why no mention of this?

You say that there will be "no noisy horns," yet you fail to mention how the event is disturbing patients at the nearby Taiwan University Hospital. Again, this favors Shih and fails to present a clear picture of what's really happening.

Why is there no mention of any of this?

As for the title of this article, these so-called sit-ins (in Mandarin, "jìng zuò" or "quiet sit") aren't "gaining ground" they're merely getting noisier.