Red light fight

Plan to legalize prostitution sparks debate between women's and worker's rights groups.

Global Post, Nov. 29, 2010

TAIPEI, Taiwan — Massive debts pushed her into prostitution. Now, after several false starts, she's pocketing $3,000 in a good month, turning tricks as a self-employed Taipei street-walker.

The money's good, she says, but there's just one problem: the cops. Prostitution is illegal in Taiwan, and the cops have several times hauled her in for three days in jail, or a fine up to $1,000.

If sex work is legalized in a year's time as now planned, though, she says her working conditions will improve.

"I can be more relaxed at work," said the sex worker, who gave only the name "Nadia," in an interview in Taipei. "I won't have worry so much about the cops; worry that they'll come and catch me. I won't be afraid of anyone bullying me."

Nadia is one of an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 sex workers in Taiwan, including hostesses that offer services short of intercourse in clubs and karaoke halls. They're at the center of a debate over whether prostitution should be legalized as planned next year, and if so in what form.

Taiwan's decisions could have implications for countries in Asia and beyond that are struggling to balance demands for social order with the protection of sex workers' rights.

Prostitution is legal in more than 70 countries worldwide, illegal in more than 100, and restricted in others. (See map from Chartsbin.com.) In Asia, Thailand and the Philippines are well-known sex tourism destinations, despite a legal ban on prostitution in both countries. China legally bans prostitution but lurches between looking the other way and harsh crackdowns, such as the public shaming of prostitutes and their Johns. Japan legally permits sex services short of intercourse, and hosts a thriving sex trade.

In Taiwan, the legalization debate has pitted women's rights groups against workers' rights groups. The former say the sex trade exploits women, is plagued with trafficking and ensnares under-age girls.

"We don't think it's just a question of workers' rights," said Wang Yueh-hao, from the Garden of Hope Foundation. "The sex trade does big damage to both sex workers and their families."

But sex workers rights' groups say the sex trade isn't going anyway anytime soon, that bans are counterproductive, and that prostitutes deserve dignity and good working conditions as much as any other laborers.

"They contribute to society, but society gives them the lowest status," said the Collective of Sex Workers and Supporters' (COSWAS) Chien Chia-ying. "That's the most unacceptable part." Sex worker rights activists in many other countries agree.

Part of the problem in Taiwan is that the laws don't make much sense. For decades prostitution was legal here. But since the 1990s, prostitutes have been punished under the Social Order Maintenance Act, COSWAS says. Pimps, middlemen and traffickers are dealt with under the criminal code, slapped with up to five years in jail or $3,300 fines. Johns aren't penalized at all.

That means it's perfectly legal to pay for sex, but illegal to sell it. Taiwan's courts found that arrangement unconstitutional in 2009, and demanded a change by November next year. So the government plans to scrap the penalty on prostitutes, and has mooted the option of legal "sex zones" in Taipei, or letting small brothels of five or six prostitutes run their own small business out of apartments anywhere in the city.

Women's groups take a dim view of either scenario. The Garden of Hope's Wang said that since 90 percent of sex workers are female, "We think it's an issue of gender inequality." They want the laws to remain as they are, at the very least, and ideally to make it illegal to pay for sex, too.

They say the government should do more to help prostitutes find a way out of the trade. "We need to give them other choices, so they don't think they have to sell their body to resolve their household problems," said Wang. And they say society has an obligation to curb a destructive trade as much as possible. "You can't improve their lifestyle and rights by legalizing prostitution," said Wang. "They will still face discrimination and be under gangsters' control."

Meanwhile, COSWAS is trying to improve sex workers' public image. Their ideal is a fully legal and open sex trade in which empowered prostitutes could hire third-party services to help them market their wares, and keep more of the profits. For that reason, they say the government's plans don't go far enough -- pimping and other third-party services need to be legalized, too.

"You need to completely decriminalize the sex industry in order to protect sex workers' safety," insisted COSWAS' Wang Fang-ping. "If middlemen are still illegal, you will still have a lot of problems."

They say prostitutes kept 70 or 80 percent of the money when the trade was legal (giving the rest to pimps or other middlemen) — now it's more like 60 percent.

In an interview arranged by COSWAS, GlobalPost interviewed Nadia to find out the reality on the streets.

The interview took place in a former brothel dating back to the 1950s. It's tucked into a narrow street fragrant with incense curling out of a next-door temple, in one of Taipei's jumbled, old commercial districts. The building is now used for legal health and counseling services. Inside there's peeling wallpaper, claustrophobic rooms, bead curtains. Dim yellow lighting bathes the hallway. Photos of one-time madames dot the walls, scraps of the brothel's long-past heyday.

There are still seven or eight small, illegal brothels nearby, said Wang, but "you have to know where they are."

In the decades following World War II, this and other Taipei brothels and clubs did brisk business, helped in part by a steady supply of U.S. military men. Taiwan hosted huge U.S. bases before formal ties were broken in 1979, and the island was an R&R destination during the Vietnam War. Taipei still boasts a now down-on-its-luck bar district dubbed the "Combat Zone" by U.S. servicemen.

But in the 1990s, a Taipei mayor, inspired by New York City's Rudy Giuliani, backed an anti-smut drive as a way to gain support from conservative middle- and upper-class voters, according to Wang. Outside Taipei, only 20 to 30 legal brothels remain, still open under a loophole.

Wearing a bright pink, puffy winter jacket, Nadia took a seat in a small office, two gold rings circling bony fingers. She appeared to be in her 30s ("Why don't you guess my age," said the rail-thin sex worker, when asked).

Nadia's story doesn't easily lend itself to either side of the legalization debate. She rejected the womens' rights groups arguments, at least for self-employed sex workers like herself ("We are absolutely not exploited," she said. "We don't have bosses.") But she told a depressing tale that hardly speaks of empowerment.

Asked how she had started in the sex trade, Nadia's wary expression crumbled into choked-back grief. She said her husband left her in 2006, abandoning also a son, now 7. Saddled with huge debts (she didn't want to go into why), she turned to prostitution. But her initial attempts failed. "This work isn't as simple as it looks," she said.

First she joined a "Thai shower" joint, where customers picked girls out of a line and paid about $65 for an hour's shower, massage and sex. She only kept about $35 per customer, giving the rest to her bosses. The money wasn't enough, so she left after four days.

Then she worked at a secret "spa" with a private elevator requiring a key. There the terms were even worse: $150 a trick, of which she kept only $50. After a month, she switched to a sex "studio," where she kept $65 out of $100 per customer. "No matter which place it was, my cut wasn't fair, and there was the problem of where to get customers," she said.

So she began walking the streets. Now at least she can choose her customers, and reject any who seem too shady. She charges about $35 per 15 minutes and can clear up to $2,800 a month after paying her rent and all other expenses — although $1,500 to $1,650 per month has been more typical lately, she said.

She works 60-hour weeks, takes only one day off per week, and lives in a building with more than 50 other sex workers. Despite what women's rights groups say, she says she has no contact with gangsters, and said the only reason some sex workers sometimes have to get gangsters' help is that the trade is illegal.

Sitting beside her, COSWAS' Chien said "I can't say there's no exploitation, but I think [sex workers] are exploited a lot less than most workers are." Chien added that do-gooder plans to switch prostitutes into other work typically offer them salaries a fraction of what they can make selling their bodies. Said Nadia: "I would like to change jobs, but I don't have the ability to do other work."

Now, Nadia's top concern isn't gangsters or pimps, but police stings. She and COSWAS allege that Taipei cops routinely set up prostitutes for arrest by arranging for friends or a paid third party to approach them. Once a sex worker negotiates a price, she can be busted; meanwhile the customer is considered a "witness" to the infraction but is not fined or held.

COSWAS led protests against such set-ups last year, drawing a pledge from the mayor to end them. But with new regulations on the sex trade still in limbo, the group — and Nadia — say not much has changed.

"I'm afraid of the cops, not my customers," said Nadia.

Original site

Underworld justice

A surprising number of Taiwanese still take disputes to the gods.

Global Post, Nov. 18, 2010

HSINCHUANG, Taiwan — In his small, fluorescent-lit office, the portly temple scribe Lai Ming-hsien faces a middle-aged man in a dark blue jacket.

Lai asks the man's name, age and address, then begins jotting Chinese characters with a ball-point pen on a fresh piece of bright yellow paper, as the man looks on intently.

The matter that brought the man here is working its way through Taiwan's criminal justice system in nearby courts. But like many Taiwanese in such situations, he's also seeking an otherworldly remedy.

Lai is writing out the man's formal complaint to deliver to the "Lord of the Hordes" (Da Zheng Ye), an underworld dispenser of justice in Chinese Daoist and folk belief. (The man did not want his name or the nature of his case published.)

Here, in a side wing attached to Dizang Temple in a working-class Taipei suburb, Taiwanese come to air their grievances, at about $13 per complaint. Dizang is just one of scores of Taiwan temples offering such services, but it's among the most well-known.

In fact, business has boomed in recent years, says the 53-year-old Lai, so much so that the temple now employs three full-time scribes, who record and transmit to the gods more than 100 petitions per day. That's double or triple the number just a few years ago, when Lai was a one-man show.

Taiwan may have rapidly modernized and boosted educational levels in the past few decades, and its flagship high-tech industries embrace scientific rationalism. Yet many centuries-old, Chinese folk beliefs and practices show no signs of dying out.

Some practices have merely taken new, urban forms as Taiwan's old rural ways fade. Others — like underworld petitions — have survived into the 21st century intact, and might even be more prevalent than before. Such appeals can also be made by the dead against the living, says Paul Katz, an expert on Chinese religious and judicial traditions at Taiwan's Academia Sinica, at a recent talk in Taipei.

"There are people indicting people, ghosts indicting people, people indicting ghosts, and all sorts of other things." said Katz, who did field work at Dizang Temple. "This whole underworld indictment thing is busier than L.A. Law."

According to Katz, approximately 3,500 people file underworld petitions at the Dizang Temple every year.

The Chinese custom of underworld indictments dates back to sometime after the emergence of religious Daoism around the 2nd century A.D., with its emphasis on the bureaucratic order of the underworld.

"There's always been an idea that justice was being administered by officials in this world and the other world," Katz said.

At the Dizang Temple, the custom persists in modern packaging. Just like in a Taipei bank or clinic, petitioners file into a lobby off to the side of the main temple, take a number from a machine and wait their turn on rows of plastic chairs. When an automated voice calls out their number and shows it on a red L.E.D. screen, they step into the scribe's office.

Their complaints involve stolen vehicles, workplace troubles, extramarital affairs, even intellectual property rights disputes between technology firms.

"If they have situations they can't resolve, they come to us," Lai said. "We consider ourselves a bridge to the gods."

Katz' field work found only one change in the nature of such appeals from the late 1990s to 2006: An increase in missing pets cases. More recently, financial disputes have increased with Taiwan's high unemployment and recession-battered economy, Lai said.

The scribes also handle appeals for good health, better karma and getting rid of troublesome ghosts. Such petitions are directed toward the Buddhist deity Ksitigarbha ("Dizang Wang Pu Sa," in Chinese), Lai said. Both Ksitigarbha and the Lord of the Hordes are worshipped side by side at the temple, a common practice in Taiwan's blend of Daoist, Buddhist and folk practices.

On a recent Monday morning, some 30 Taiwanese visited the scribes in the space of a couple hours, mostly couples or small groups of relatives. Some of the men chewed betel nut, the mild stimulant popular with Taiwan's working class; others toted babies.

Wei, a 50-year-old man from the nearby city Shulin, padded in and out of Lai's office in old-fashioned wooden, thonged sandals, as a female companion waited outside. He said he came to ask the gods for relief from bad karma he believes he earned in a past life and is plaguing him in this one. It was his second visit; the first was three months ago for "another matter," he said, declining to elaborate.

An elderly couple asked Lai to write down their appeal for a relative's cancer treatment to go smoothly. After Lai had done so, they each pressed their left thumbs on a red ink pad and put a print on the yellow paper, which Lai then folded neatly and gave to them.

Every so often Lai refuses a case. One instance involved a third party in an adulterous love triangle, another, an inheritance dispute between brothers, he said. "You can't write just anything" and pass it on to the gods, said Lai. Sometimes he tells petitioners they should first go see a lawyer; sometimes lawyers send their clients to him.

If he's uncertain about a case, he may use a delaying tactic, such as telling a petitioner to first directly approach the gods. If the petitioner tosses wood divination blocks in front of the god's altar and three times in a row get a "yes" answer, he'll take the case.

Prices for a petition haven't gone up much — it cost $7.50 a pop when he began working as a scribe 32 years ago. But he works longer hours; he now gets only one day off a week and works eight or eight-and-a-half hour days with an hour's lunch break. Back when the temple paid him based on the number of petitions he wrote, he could earn better money than he does now (about $1,600 a month), but the income wasn't as stable, he said.

He said he mainly taught himself how to write indictments in formal Chinese, and experience tells him when a petitioner is lying. He keeps an Asustek "Eee PC" netbook on his desk, but only to listen to music. "I'm used to writing" petitions by hand, he says, though the other two scribes now tap out theirs on computers.

Katz said temple appeals have traditionally been made to win legitimacy for one's cause, or to prove one's innocence. That's an important move in a judicial culture where the burden of proof usually lies with the accused. Cops and lawyers have been known to make offerings to the gods, or even take suspects to the temple as a test of their honesty, he said.

Scribes like Lai deal with situations the courts "can't or won't deal with," Katz said. Going to a temple scribe can also be a way to "put pressure on family and friends in cases where it's difficult to work within the legal system," or to cool off a dispute.

Many Taiwanese charge into the scribes' offices in an agitated, emotional state, said Katz. But Lai then calmly writes out their complaint in formal Chinese. "By the time these people leave the temple, their facial expression has totally changed — a lot of that anger is gone," Katz said. "So it's really a great safety valve."

Taiwanese often appeal to the underworld at the same time as they pursue a case in court, Lai said. His services are especially valued since the island's judicial system is plagued by corruption, he said, citing recent high-profile cases of crooked judges.

"Judges can be bribed, but the gods cannot," Lai said.

Huang Guo-rong contributed to this report

Original site

Commercial bloggers cash in

Cartoonist Wanwan shows how enterprising Taiwanese turned blogs into big business

Global Post, October 24, 2010

TAIPEI, Taiwan — Hu Jia-wei started posting cartoons about her office life to her blog in 2004 because work was "too boring."

Six years later, the 29-year-old, better known by her cartoon alter-ego "Wanwan," is a brand name, complete with an agent and rabid fan following in Taiwan and throughout east Asia. Her blog gets more than 100,000 visitors a day, and she's sold more than a million copies of her cartoon books in six Asian countries. She's also licensed her images for scores of TV commercials, products and promotions.

Her story shows how a few savvy Taiwan bloggers have parlayed their online popularity into business opportunities and fame.

Besides Wanwan, other notable examples include "Nu Wang" (The Queen), who launched best-selling books on the popularity of her girl-power, Sex-in-the-City-style blog.

But in comics-crazy Taiwan, cute cartoon blogs hold a special appeal. Several regularly appear in the top ten blog rankings. The "Caterpillar" blog features simple cartoons like Wanwan's, and Mark Lee's "I'm Mark" blog, which mines Dilbert-like territory of absurd office dynamics and has also inspired a book.

But Wanwan holds the cartoon blog throne. Her blog has been in the top five or so for at least a few years, and often tops the charts. Wanwan and her agent were cagey about her earnings, but one Taiwan media estimate puts her net worth as high as $3.25 million.

Why is she so popular? Jerry Hsu, marketing and sales director at BloggerAds in Taipei, said her success is due in part to clever promotional tactics.

A convenience store chain passed out stickers with her cartoons, and many of Taiwan's eight million users of the MSN Messenger instant messaging service downloaded and used her cute, funny "emoticons," said Hsu. "These were simple cartoons to show 'boredom', 'annoyance', 'happiness' — everyone started using them," he said. "They were distributed for free, and allowed many people to get to know her."

Now, Wanwan has helped launch a trend of cartoon bloggers, many of whom also offer free emoticons and have turned their sites into at least a part-time business.

In an interview with GlobalPost in a private room at a Taipei coffee-shop, the poised, well-spoken Hu said she drew cartoons about everyday experiences that people could easily connect with — starting with her parody of soul-crushing office life.

"Everyone who works in an office has had these experiences," said Hu. "And when it comes to work and day-to-day life, these things happen in every country."

Watch "Wanwan" in action here:

Shortly after graduating from college in design, Hu went to work at a computer game design firm, joining the ranks of Taiwan's shangbanzu — or "office tribe." She created a blog and started posting cartoons and instant-message "emoticons" inspired by life in Taipei's white-collar trenches.

Her cute style and depiction of that life — complete with goofy bosses, inane elevator conversation and broken-down air conditioners — soon struck a nerve.

"At first, just some friends and relatives saw it, but it got more and more popular," said Hu. "I never thought it would get so big.

A typical cartoon shows Wanwan dying to tell her clueless boss he's got food stuck in his teeth, but finally daring not to.

Soon a Taipei publisher, Revolution Star, had taken note of her popularity, and in 2005 it released her first, best-selling cartoon book, "Can we not go to work?" (Ke bu keyi bu yao shang ban?)

That same year, the company she worked for went belly-up, and she became a full-time blogger, cartoonist and author, often sleeping in as long as she likes.

Six other books have followed, on themes like school ("Can we not go to school?) travel ("Can we go on vacation every day?") and raising pets. More recently, she's focused on her family life, chronicling her older brother and mother's travails (her older sister and father are off-limits because they're "more serious" and don't like being the subject of her cartoons, said Hu.)

She's published in China (where unauthorized editions of her cartoon books are also available, she said), South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, and she says her readers span elementary-school age to recent college graduates.

Now, thousands follow her on Facebook, Plurk, (Taiwan's Twitter clone) and a mainland China Twitter clone. When she appears at conventions or book signings, huge crowds show up to meet her. Her agent helps her review frequent promotional and licensing requests.

She's already cooperated with cellphone firm Taiwan Dageda, the Family Mart convenience stores in Shanghai, and the popular bakery chain 85 degrees C. Alcohol or cigarette ads are out. "Many of my fans are kids, so we can't accept that," says Hu. Her blog has had some 240 million visits since it launched in 2004.

It's heady stuff for a young woman who, as a girl, would sneak comics back home to read, stuffing them under her clothes so her mom wouldn't find them. "My dream was to be a cartoonist, but I always thought it was just a dream," said Hu. "I've been very lucky."

As a kid, she devoured Japanese comics on the sly, especially those starring the blue robot cat from the future, Doraemon (called "Xiao Ding-dang" in Chinese). Her mother disapproved. A typical Taiwanese parent, she wanted Hu to spend all her time studying so she could be a doctor or teacher one day, rather than wasting time on frivolities such as comics.

Now her mother takes credit for her success, likes to boast about her daughter to strangers, and urges Hu to write about her in her cartoons, said Hu with a laugh. Hu is even collaborating with her mother on a new book.

She learning drawing techniques in school, but when it came to drawing Wan Wan, she reverted to a doodle-like style, making rapid sketches and sloppy Chinese characters with a Wacom pen tablet that she touches up in Photoshop. She says she can finish a typical frame in ten minutes. "If you want to draw everyday life, the simplest style is the best," she said.

She gave an impromptu demonstration of her sketching style at the coffee-shop, rapidly sketching a cartoon in thick, black lines.

What's next for Wanwan?

She's now targeting the Japan market ("Japan doesn't often accept foreign books, so it's very difficult," says Hu.) And she's mulling an English-language edition, possibly even a U.S. edition. "I'm very interested in the American market," she said.

Original site

Tweaking the Old Masters

A young painter is one of several artists boosting Taiwan's identity with classic techniques.

August 27, 2010

TAIPEI, Taiwan — About seven years ago, when he was just 21 years old, Taiwan painter Lee Cheng-dao and his father — also an accomplished painter — took a trip to the famous Louvre Museum in Paris.

Lee had embarked on a painting career, and his father wanted him to see the best of the best. For several days, father and son studied the masters: Rembrandt, Ingres, John Singer Sargent, Rubens.

"It's very difficult for original paintings to come to Taiwan," said Lee, in an interview at his Taipei studio. "So we went from painting to painting, looking at all of them. The museum was open from something like 10 in the morning to 10 in the evening, and we spent it all there — eating lunch and dinner at the museum."

Over the next few years, back in Taiwan, Lee began to marry those masters' high techniques of light and shadow with earthy, at times risque subject matter — a group of mahjong players, pool players, over-weight people, karaoke-hall girls.

He often throws in the marks of "taike" culture, a once derogatory term for low-class Taiwanese culture that's since become a hip and trendy handle: bottles of Taiwan Beer, tattoos, flip-flops, short-sleeved floral-print shirts, cheap cigarettes, scooter helmets.

"Taike culture is Taiwan's most unique culture; what Taiwan has developed itself — its most impressive culture," said Lee. "It's very grass-roots, and very tacky, but it fits Taiwan's own style."

The resulting blend of high technique and low subject matter has earned him recognition as one of Taiwan's top young emerging painters, with a whimsically ironic style. He's one of several young artists who are both reflecting and promoting a distinctly Taiwanese identity that's grown especially strong in the last decade.

Lee had a group show in 2007 with three other artists also loosely linked with the "taike" trend, then his first solo exhibition in 2009.

Painting more down-to-earth, everyday subjects goes back at least to Jean-Francois Millet, who shocked his stuffy contemporaries by painting peasants working in the fields instead of the conventional subject matter of gods and heroes, Biblical figures, or kings and emperors.

But Lee's subject matter didn't immediately win everybody over. Among the skeptics was his most important teacher in college in Taipei.

"My teacher felt my paintings weren't at all impressive," said Lee. "They were too un-serious."

Lee's dad took some convincing, too.

"At first he thought, you should paint more beautiful, more grand subject matter, not such joking things," said Lee. "But later, he felt it wasn't so bad — and there are people who will buy these paintings. Today's people aren't the same, they can accept this type of art."

Indeed, they've snatched it up: Lee says he's sold 80 percent of his paintings, earning enough to pursue his art full-time. At least until Taiwan's military service obligations intervened.

In a July interview at this Taipei studio, Lee said he had just finished basic training and was about to report for the 10-month military stint that's still mandatory for young Taiwanese men because of the threat from China.

He had a deep tan and buzz-cut from training, and wore stylish flip-flops, red-framed Ray-Ban glasses, cargo shorts and a T-shirt with a Charlie's Angels silhouette and the English words "I feel welcome here," which he said was his brother's.

"I got a lot skinnier," in basic training, he said. "Now I can wear my younger brother's clothes."

Basic training was a big adjustment.

"If I was younger I could immediately enter this kind of life," Lee said. "But since I'm older, I couldn't stop thinking about outside things — what my friends were doing, what they were painting, what exhibits they were mounting."

He found ways to adapt — writing long letters, getting up at 4:30 in the morning so he could have some space and time to himself. His drill sergeant found out he was an artist and asked him to redecorate and fix up a disordered lounge, which spared Lee more unpleasant chores. He painted a portrait of the sergeant.

Lee's studio doubles as a classroom space for his father's art classes, and is stocked with the younger Lee's paintings, art books crammed on tall shelves, huge blown-up photographs from which he works, classical busts, a Giant racing bicycle slung on the wall in back. Lee sat at a table and explained his technique.

The series of paintings that won him attention, "King's Game," were inspired by humorous twists on the masters. Caravaggio's "The Supper at Emmaus" inspired Lee's "Toss the Dice" and "Mah-jongg." Lee's "Prince's Dessert" echoes Manet's "Olympia." His betel nut beauty is painted in the style of a saint.

He started to paint from elaborately staged, carefully lit photos, using friends as models. Some of his paintings come off as gags, albeit rendered in exquisite detail.

"I don't like things that are too serious, and bore everyone," he said. "I want to take very simple and common subjects and make them very 'jingcai'," said Lee, using a word that translates roughly as "brilliant" or "exquisite." "I want to paint things that people can understand. I don't think art should be so serious."

"You can think it's not high art, it's low art," he continued. "But in the contemporary art world, people don't care so much about that. So we have more freedom."

Lee went on to paint the series "Heroes' True Colors," showing fat men peeling out of superheroes' outfits, and a "Fighting Nymphs" series of scantily clad women, many also overweight. ("I like painting people that aren't good-looking," he said.)

He said he's part of a loose group of young, like-minded painters, including Lo Chan-peng, Yu Wei-yi, and Huang Pei-huang, who both reference and at times slyly mock Taiwan identity and youth culture.

Lo does ultra-realistic, photo-like paintings of Taiwan's "strawberry tribe," referring to those born in the 1980s; Yu paints young Taiwanese men in bathroom scenes; Huang paints up-close images of fatty flesh, as well as mutilated images of Barbie dolls and Doraemon, the Japan-spawned blue robot cat from the future that's wildly popular in Taiwan. The four were featured in a 2007 exhibit called "Fancying self as Taiwanese."

"When you talk about 'Taiwanese,' it's easy to get political," said Lee. "But our attitude and that of politicians is far apart. We're more indifferent, we have a more relaxed attitude."

Lee said the group is interested in exhibiting in China, but hasn't yet looked into it ("the mainland is very sensitive," said Lee.) And two of the group's members — Lee and Lo — will have to finish up their military service before they can figure out the future. "Our group hasn't yet thought about the next step," said Lee.

Original site

Dance for the masses

Could Gate is feted abroad. So what are they doing in the sticks?

August 3, 2010

CHANGHUA, Taiwan — The skinny, bespectacled man strides on stage, a slight figure facing tens of thousands on an overcast night in this central Taiwan city, where jumbled urban sprawl gives way suddenly to concrete-bound rice paddies.

"Da gei ho!" he bellows to the crowd — "Hello everyone!" in the Taiwanese dialect. "Ho!" comes the indistinct reply from the crowd, followed by thunderous applause.

This is Lin Hwai-min, one of Taiwan's best-known artists, revered for putting this small island on the map in the international arts scene. He stands alone on stage, a tiny illuminated figure from the perspective of the bleachers across the sports stadium, where bored local cops crack jokes and latecomers stream in, hunting seats.

("Wah-sei!" said one kid, using an expression roughly equivalent to "Whoah!", as he walked onto the bleachers. "There are so many people!")

Lin's troupe, the Cloud Gate Dance Theater, is now legendary in the world of contemporary dance for its distinctive blend of Western techniques (learned in New York City), Chinese culture and themes from Taiwan's own, unique historical legacy.

Cloud Gate has been anointed by the arts pooh-bahs in Manhattan and by critics in the most chic capitals of Europe. But tonight, the troupe is in central Taiwan, in a tumbledown town even most Taiwanese don't bother to stop in, to share high art with the masses — for free.

Lin goes on to tell the crowd, speaking in a mix of Taiwanese and Mandarin Chinese, that this is Cloud Gate's 22nd free concert in 15 years, and that by now they have performed for 2 million Taiwanese spectators. He thanks the show's volunteers, then turns the stage over to his performers.

Spectators up front — some of whom had arrived more than four hours earlier to secure a good vantage point — focus on the stage with hushed silence and rapt attention. On the fringes and in back, others chat and laugh, kids chase each other, and curious badminton players poke their heads in to see what all the fuss is about.

Changhua resident Adrian Liu, 37, talks and jokes with a group of cops just in front of the bleachers, his wife and 10-year-old daughter beside him. They ignore the start of the show, but later turn their heads stage-ward. "It's free, so we can come to this show," said Liu with a smile. "Usually it's too expensive."

Asked what he thought of Cloud Gate, "I think they can really represent Taiwan — everyone has heard of them and knows who they are."

On stage, a female dancer in green writhes, twirls her legs with spinning kicks, against a soundtrack of high, nervous strings, clacking wooden blocks and gongs.

The first dance piece — inspired by a Chinese folktale about a scholar seduced by a snake — ends. A brief film plays, explaining how the carved wood snake's nest used in the number had burned in a fire; earlier this year Lin Hwai-min found two craftsmen right here in Changhua County who made a new one. Everyone claps again.



Another piece begins, black-clad dancers leap and twist in the air, inspired by Chinese calligraphy. To one side of the audience, two kids toss around a fuzzy ball, their hands strapped into Velcro-lined paddles. Two other kids run away to race.

The deep, resonant strains of a Bach cello suite begin. A lone female dancer bathed in intense white light makes Tai-chi-like motions with her slight arms amid descending cello arpeggios. Kids and their parents begin to line up at the side of the audience for a chance to dance on stage after the show.

"Tony" and "Hannah" are two of them. Eight-year-old Tony says he doesn't really care to go on stage; older Hannah says she wants to, then shows off a cartwheel.

Intermission. A 52-year-old Changhua native stands in back and to the side, chewing betel nut, spitting out the juice now and then into a nearby trashcan. "It's OK," he says of the show. "It depends on what you like."

He says the show is funded by the Cathay Financial Group, one of Taiwan's biggest banks and insurers, as a tax write-off.

"They just want to pay less tax," he said, then spat out another stream of brown-red juice. "Everyone here is from Changhua," he said; asked how he knows, "Because they're all wearing flip-flops." Other, less laid-back Taiwanese "wouldn't dare do that" at a special event like this.

The first time he saw Cloud Gate, the 52-year-old, who works in a health products factory, said he had to look at the program to understand what was going on. He says he once saw them perform a dance the program said was about Taiwan's White Terror (during martial law, 1949-1987), but he couldn't tell from looking what it was about. "But they performed really well," he added.

His beer-bellied friend comes by, clad in a dark blue polo shirt and holding a fan printed with slogans promoting the new China-Taiwan trade deal; they were passing those out for free, too. The first man says his 19-year-old son is at home, ("He prefers to watch TV in air-conditioning"), his daughter is still at work. Light rain begins to fall; the two men leave.

The last number wraps up, one with male dancers lifting up female dancers in bright pastel costumes, as bright pink paper in the shape of flower petals blows onto the stage from the wings; a petal downpour. The show ends, Lin comes out to take a bow with his dancers.

Then spectators are led on stage in groups, mostly kids and teens or 20-somethings, but a few older types, too. They run back and forth, dancing and throwing the pink paper around with excitement.
Little boys start flower-petal wars, throwing huge fistfuls in other kids' faces.

"The free concerts began 30 years ago, at first they were in front of temples, in the countryside," said Cloud Gate marketing director Liu Gia-yu. "Fifteen years ago Cathay started supporting it."

"He [Lin] wanted people who don't normally see dance to have a chance to see it," Liu said. "When he was young, nobody was promoting contemporary dance in Taiwan. No one understood what contemporary dance was."

"He thought the Taiwan public could understand contemporary dance, it's just that no one had performed it for them before."

These days, Cloud Gate is famous in global dance circles, and much in demand abroad. A second troupe, Cloud Gate 2, stays closer to home and to Lin's roots. "They don't go abroad, they spend all their time in central and south Taiwan, in the countryside or at schools and universities," Liu said. "All their concerts are free, except one during the Lunar New Year."

Back on stage, a spectator has lost his eyeglasses somewhere amid the pink petals. They have to clear the stage while staff comb through the pink jumble, looking for them. A father comes on stage and calls out for his lost daughter over a microphone.

The MC holds up one temple arm from the lost pair of glasses; it must have been ripped from the rest of the frames in all the stomping and running. A few minutes later the other temple arm is found, but not the lenses.

"This means there may be broken glass, so we can't let anyone else on stage," the MC said, apologizing to the last group of hyper kids and other would-be Baryshnikovs, still waiting for their moment.

Original site

From kettle to kennel

Taipei dogs take to the cat walk (and treadmill)

Once likely to end up in a stew-pot, dogs have never had it so good in newly affluent Taiwan.

Global Post, July 21, 2010

TAIPEI, Taiwan — She put her finger out for a dab of purple dye, her white terrier thrown over her right shoulder.

Then, hesitatingly, she ran her finger over her dog's fuzzy tail, streaking it with color. Two nearby 20-something women looked on with glee, now and then cooing the obligatory Taiwanese response to any such situation: "Hao ke-ai-oh! (so cute!)" The Guns N' Roses tune "Sweet Child of Mine" blared from nearby speakers.

This was the booth for Pet Head, a dog-hair-dye company, and one of the most popular at this year's Pets Show Taipei. Along with dyeing products — one of this year's hot trends, as evidenced by the fierce competition at a dog-dyeing contest [3] — a convention hall was filled with all the latest innovations in pet pampering.

There were dog-massaging stations. Designer pet-toting bags and buggies, some upwards of $1,000. Cute dog clothes. Healthy treats for dogs marked "LOHAS" (for Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability, an acronym that's all the rage in wealthy Taipei). A treadmill for dogs. (Read to the end for a series of Dog vs. Treadmill video clips.) And on of the previous days, there was even yoga for dogs and a poodle wedding, according to news reports.

Nothing too extraordinary for dog-doting New Yorkers, perhaps, or for Europeans. But the pet show demonstrates how quickly and dramatically attitudes toward pets — particularly dogs — have changed in this newly-wealthy corner of Asia.

Just 10 years ago, dogs were still eaten in public restaurants and raised on farms for that purpose in Taiwan. Traditional Chinese medicine held that so-called "fragrant meat" from dogs could fortify one's health.

Now, selling dog meat is illegal, and violators can be slapped with a nearly $8,000 fine, according to Huang Ching-jung, secretary-general of Taiwan's Animal Protection Association. Eating dog is viewed by many Taiwanese as an embarrassing reminder of a poorer time, though it's still eaten on the down-low in rural, southern Taiwan, Huang said.

Instead, Taiwanese have embraced dog-owning culture with a vengeance. Dogs are brought into restaurants, fussed over in public, dressed up in ridiculous outfits and wheeled to the park in frilly custom-made buggies.

Huang chalks up the rapid change in attitude to several factors. Taiwan's education level has risen rapidly, and animal welfare groups like his have successfully campaigned for better treatment of animals, with the media's help. The island has gotten richer, meaning Taiwanese can now afford many types of meat, and can buy other medicines.

"You don't need dog meat to make you healthier, and we don't need dogs as a source of meat," said Huang. "So dogs have become our friends and companions."

Also, Taiwanese are increasingly shunning marriage and deciding not to have kids (the island has one of Asia's lowest birth rates). Raising a dog has become a substitute. "It's like having a child — it becomes family," said Huang.

Finally, there's one all-important factor: "Dogs are very cute animals," Huang said.

The pet show-goers couldn't have agreed more. They crammed into the convention center's narrow aisles, their canines (and the odd, freaked-out-looking cat) in tow — leashed, wheeled in buggies or strapped stomach-side — craning necks to see the latest trendy pet products. Scantily clad showgirls representing pet food companies whipped up the crowd's enthusiasm, though their numbers were fewer here than at Taiwan's computer trade shows [5].

One promotion girl hurled fist-sized bags of Purina Pro Plan into the crowd without warning. Two hit me in the face and neck in rapid succession — bam! thok! — as I was looking the other direction snapping photos.

At the Pet Head booth, George Ambrose said he started his trading company three years ago to distribute dog-hair-dyeing and other products in Taiwan. In the U.S., he said, dog-dyeing "is catching on," in Taiwan it's relatively new (it's also hot in China [6].) He had me sniff a bottle of the temporary dye to show it was ammonia-free.

I lurked around the demonstration table ("Is this CSI?" one young, self-conscious Taiwanese woman joked as I snapped pictures of her dog having its ears streaked green, referring to the TV show "Crime Scene Investigation" that's popular here). Other owners held up their pooches proudly in a "we're ready for our close-up" kind of way.

Down the aisle, Albert Chan was touting healthy pet food products from his company, Perfect Companion (Taiwan). They had set up a treadmill for dogs in the booth. Some dogs caught on quickly, especially if a treat was extended by hand from the front of the treadmill.

Others got distracted, or just couldn't grasp the running-in-place concept and went flying off the back of the treadmill in a blur of fur and frantically-pawing limbs.

By late afternoon, nerves at the pet show had gotten raw as people had to elbow past each other in confined walkways and fight for promotional give-aways. One lane reeked of dog poo that had been pressed and ground into the red carpeted-floor ("How stinky!" one woman moaned loudly, to no-one in particular). Pet company staff started taking their booths down.

Taiwanese women gathered with their dogs on the long sidewalk outside the convention center, as their shaggy-haired boyfriends took drags of Mild Seven cigarettes. Two guys walked their tiny mutt down the sidewalk; it kept stopping, snapping the leash taut.

"What, you still haven't finished peeing?" its owner said affectionately.

Original site

China puts the squeeze on blogs

China Tightens Control of Blogs and Microblogs

AOL News

TAIPEI, Taiwan (July 16) -- China appears to have tightened restrictions over blogs and "microblogs" in the last week, underscoring Beijing authorities' jitters over the subversive potential of social media.

The Associated Press says that several bloggers had reported that their sites were down as of Thursday evening.

"I was writing a new post, and suddenly my blog couldn't open," lawyer Pu Zhiqiang told the AP on Thursday.

Ng Han Guan, AP

Dozens of blogs by some of China's most outspoken users have been abruptly shut down while popular Twitter-like services appear to be the newest target in government efforts to control social networking.

Meanwhile, China's growing pack of Twitter clones, or "micro-blogging" sites, had service outages or displayed messages suggesting some type of network testing was under way.

Netease's "weibo" or micro-blog site went down for maintenance for several days, while those of the Sina, Sohu and Tencent services displayed "beta" tags next to their logos, according to the AP.

"The government will definitely tighten their control over microblogging, but I don't think they'll completely shut them down," popular Chinese blogger Lian Yue told NBC News. "It's hard to dig out the real reason behind this temporary shutdown, but it could be related to the change of the way information spread."

Twitter, Facebook and other Western-origin, popular social media sites are blocked for China's Internet users, now estimated to number 420 million.

However, Beijing authorities have allowed homegrown clones such as social media site Kaixin.com to prosper, on the condition that they self-censor objectionable content in line with government rules.

Chinese authorities are playing an increasingly complex game of restricting some Internet content while promoting other kinds of online expression as part of the nation's modernization drive.

Verboten online content includes mentions of banned religious sect Falun Gong, Taiwan or Tibet independence or strong criticism of the central government that crosses an unspecified "red line." Search for such subjects typically returns an "error" message, with access to the Internet sometimes blocked for several minutes afterward.

Any attempt to organize opposition to the central authorities online is quickly quashed by an army of "net nannies" patrolling chat rooms and other sites. Social media is a particular challenge because criticism can spread in scale so quickly online.

Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at the University of California-Berkeley, told the AP that authorities can't keep up with the proliferation of new media. "Given the speed and volume of microblogging content produced in Chinese cyberspace, censors are still several steps behind at this stage," Xiao said.

Other raucous debate and discussion is given free rein, such as netizens' debate over a recent police shooting in Guangzhou, popular discontent with local party officials or so-called "human flesh search-engine" cases.

The latter refers to a mob of netizens who work together to find and post personal information about someone who has sparked their wrath, contempt or intense curiosity.

Some government units are actually promoting social media as a way to reach out to residents. A report from the Shenzhen Evening News posted to Sina.com said the Pingshan Ministry of Public Security in southern China opened a microblog Thursday evening.

"We want to strengthen our communication with city residents and Web users, increasing the interaction between police and the people through more channels," an unnamed security official told journalists, according to the report.

According to another report, from the China News Service today, public security ministries in 21 cities in southern Guangdong Province had launched microblogs, and Beijing police are planning to launch a microblog too. But the fate of such sites generated by private citizens rather than government entities seems more unclear than ever.

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Obama film opens

Movie About Obama's Childhood Opens Today

AOL News

(July 1) -- A movie based on President Barack Obama's childhood years in Indonesia opened on Indonesian screens today, depicting a young Barack in a goofy school uniform playing ping-pong, tooling around in a rickshaw, boxing bullies and then learning that "fighting isn't the solution."

"Obama Anak Menteng," or "Obama the Menteng Kid," is based on the book by the same name by Damien Dematra, who made the film with John de Rantau. Menteng is a district of Indonesia's capital city, Jakarta.

The film was made in just a month, with a rushed schedule to have it ready in time for Obama's scheduled trip to Indonesia a couple weeks ago. Obama ended up postponing that trip due to the Gulf oil spill.

MVP Pictures / AFP / Getty Images

A young Barack Obama, played by actor Hasan Faruq Ali, holds a miniature Statue of Liberty in "Obama the Menteng Kid," a film about Obama's childhood days in Indonesia.

The movie is a classic new-kid-on-the-block tale of mixed-race Obama trying to fit in and be accepted in his new Asian home. It's set during his years in Indonesia, 1967-1971, and is based on some 30 interviews Dematra conducted with childhood friends and others, according to the Christian Science Monitor.

"What are you actually?" one kid asks the young newcomer, in the film. "Westerner, but dark colored. Weird hair. Big nose."

Other scenes show him confronting a bully over a marble game, learning how to box and be a man from his stepfather Lolo Soetoro, and then saying tearful goodbyes.

The director said the film was about 60 percent true and 40 percent fiction, according to an interview with Time magazine.

The snarky gossip site Wonkette called the film "the Indonesian 'Karate Kid' ripoff," said it was "very, very loosely" based on Obama's years in Indonesia, and mocked the film's attempts to explain the roots of Obama's character.

"Look, that's where Obama got his karate skillz! It all makes sense now! And you see that little brown Desi Arnaz kicking those marbles? That's when Barry came up with his most vindictive idea, Obamacare."

The trailer's most sensational bits are scenes of Obama being biked to work by his effeminate nanny, a detail the director says was based on fact. A scene in the book of Obama imitating his Muslim friends at prayer in a mosque was not included in the movie version, because it was "too political," the director told Agence France-Presse.

"That scene wasn't even shot because I didn't want people to take it out of context and use it against him," Dematra said.

Twelve-year-old American actor Hasan Faruq Ali, who is also the son of a white mother and African-American father and speaks some Bahasa, played the young Obama. Scenes of Obama's old neighborhood in Jakarta were actually shot in Bandung, West Java.

Dematra knew "virtually nothing" about Obama until he hatched the idea of writing a book about him at a dinner party at the U.S. embassy in Jakarta, according to the Christian Science Monitor.

The film opened in theaters across Indonesia today after premiering Wednesday at a screening in Jakarta, and negotiations are underway for a U.S. release, the Monitor reported. See still photos and more information at the movie's official website.

Original site

Bogus Chinese ATM

Beijing cops bust bogus ATM

AOL News

TAIPEI, Taiwan (June 25) -- Talk about a get-rich-quick scheme.

Chinese police busted a man who installed a fake ATM in Beijing in order to steal unwitting users' bank accounts and personal identification numbers, according to a Beijing TV news report translated at Chinahush.com.

The case highlights the proliferation of fraud, petty crime and fakery in today's go-go China, as millions hustle for an edge amid the country's headlong drive toward modernization.

Police arrested a 30-year-old and charged him with fraud, the report said, and removed the fake ATM for further investigation. The man, surnamed Huang, confessed to the scheme and said his machine could record users ATM card numbers and PINs.

Chinahush.com

Chinese police arrested a man in Beijing who installed this fake ATM to access bank users' information.

The report did not say how many people the machine fooled, but noted that "customers who used this 'ATM' soon found that all their money in the bank account disappeared without a trace."

Taiwan's Apple Daily reported that a customer who tried to use the machine got an error message on the screen saying, "This ATM is temporarily out of service," only to find two days later that all 2,100 renminbi (about $300) in his account was gone. Calls to an emergency number posted on the machine reached a bank, which said it had no ATM at that location.

The Apple Daily quoted a local person who said, "Now even ATMs are fake -- there's no way to defend yourself."

But a policeman said the fake ATM was so shoddily made that any observant user should have realized it wasn't the real thing.

"As you can see, here there's some leftover glue," he told Beijing TV. "The slot where receipts are supposed to come out is actually solid inside -- it's just a metal plate glued onto the machine. And the slot where cash is supposed to come out is also sealed shut.

"The overhead security camera is just a piece of plastic, and there is no logo or name of any specific bank on the machine. Therefore, alert citizens could easily see that this is a fake ATM," he said.

The Beijing TV news report dubbed the ersatz cash-cougher a "shanzhai" ATM, using popular Chinese slang for a knockoff product. The term literally means "mountain stronghold" and was originally coined to describe ultra-cheap, imitation or generic cell phones and other gadgets, most made in small, obscure factories in southern China.

"Shanzhai" reports have filled the Chinese media and Internet, including a recent report on a man who built his own knockoff Lamborghini; China's homegrown answer to Google.com, Goojje.com; Kentucky Fried Chicken clones; and even fake universities.

Last year, two Taiwanese grifters were busted in Thailand for swindling mainland Chinese marks out of some 10 million baht (about $300,000) in a wide-scale ATM con. Credit card fraud is also on the rise in China, according to a recent report in the China Daily.

Original site

China worker suicides

China worker suicides: a lost generation?

Amid hand-wringing and rising labor unrest, some blame generational change and the media.

Global Post, June 14, 2010

TAIPEI, Taiwan — He had big dreams of success as a professional singer, loved Lady Gaga and Taiwanese pop star Jay Chou, and even took part in the company talent show.

But in reality, Lu Xin, 24, felt like just another cog in the massive Foxconn electronics production machine. He toiled on the lines with more than 300,000 others at a sprawling campus in the southern Chinese boomtown of Shenzhen, working long hours with little glamor or diversion.

On May 6, Lu opened a window, walked out onto a sixth floor balcony, and threw himself to his death, according to China's state-run broadcaster CCTV.

"I came to this company for money," Lu wrote in his diary, according to CCTV. "[But then I realized], this is a waste of my life and my future. In the first step of my adult life, I took the wrong path. I'm lost."

Lu was one of 12 apparent suicide attempts — leaving 10 dead and two in the hospital — since January at Taiwan-based contract electronics giant Foxconn, a disturbing streak that has turned the world media's spotlight on this once obscure firm.

Now, some commentators are pointing to the gap between the soaring expectations of a new generation of Chinese youth and the harsh reality of the factories in which they toil as a factor in the deaths. Others are also wondering if the Chinese media itself helped inspire copycat suicides at the firm.

"The new generation is better educated, has higher dreams, more thoughts, and feels more suffering," according to a broadcast [3] on the Foxconn deaths that ran on CCTV in May. The piece also highlighted a 24-year-old girl with aspirations of being a model who jumped to her death on May 11, just a few days after Xu.

"The previous generation only thought about how to improve the lives of their family; they were willing to 'eat bitterness' and restrained themselves," said the report. "The younger generation thinks about themselves more, so they can't endure as much as the old generation. Under the heavy workload, they become disappointed more easily, even losing all hope."

Experts say suicide is the tragic result of a complicated mix of factors, which can't be boiled down to any one, simplistic explanation. Many media accounts, for example, have focused only on allegedly harsh work conditions at Foxconn's factories.

Such conditions have long been highlighted by labor activists, as GlobalPost reported last year in the investigative series "Silicon Sweatshops." [4]

But such work conditions are hardly new — they've been typical in China at least since the late 1980s, when Foxconn and other Taiwan and Hong Kong firms set up shop in the Pearl River Delta to crank out electronics parts for big Western brands. If anything, workers now have more support, with a suicide hot-line and care center at one of the Foxconn factories in question.

So why the sudden, apparently unprecedented string of deaths this year?

What has changed, some analysts say, is the workers themselves. Today's Chinese Foxconn employees are a "second wave" of migrant workers [5], much different than their predecessors who first moved from China's hinterlands to coastal areas for better jobs, say commentators [6].

In China they're part of the "post-80" and "post-90" generations, named for their birthdates. They're stereotyped as more ambitious, more self-centered, more impulsive, and more vulnerable to pressure than their elders. That's not always a good fit with a highly regimented, impersonal, jumbo-sized factory jobs like those at Foxconn.

Such youth are typecast as "little emperors": pampered, only children resulting from China's one-child policy, and born after the Cultural Revolution that defined their elders in a crucible of chaos. The Foxconn employees who fell from buildings were aged between 18 and 24, putting them right at the transition from the post-80 to post-90 generation.

The post-90 generation, raised on an exploding Internet culture, has come in for special attention — as well as scorn — for their embrace of Japanese, Taiwanese and Korean pop culture [7], including the Japanese "culture of cute," and for their supposed promiscuity.

They've been called the "brain-damaged tribe," after a type of garbled "brain-damaged" script [7] some use on blogs, instant messages [8] and chat room services like the popular QQ.

A 2008 survey of 800 students at Wuhan University found post-90 youths to be more "open-minded" than their elders but "less able to cope with frustration," according to a report in Xinhua [9].

Paul Yip, from the Hong Kong Jockey Club Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention, put the change in workers themselves at the top of his list of factors behind the suicides, along with a stressful work environment, lack of government oversight, the mass media, and neglect of workers' mental well-being. "We have a new cohort and generation here," said Yip.

"The so-called post-80s or post-90s babies, when they grew up in the countryside and studied in school, they were given a lot of flexibility and freedom," said Yip. "But when they go to Foxconn, their whole lifestyle, everything changes. This causes a lot of stress."

"Twenty or 30 years ago, the environment was much worse, but those people were tough, willing to work for it and to earn the money," Yip said. "But these young people, they are not that tough. They don't want to come to the city to face hardship, they want a new life. But their new life turns out to be working 12 to 14 hours per day. They are not prepared for this situation."

An open letter [10] from nine Hong Kong and mainland sociologists made similar points. "Many second generation migrant workers, unlike their parents’ generation, have no thought of returning home to become peasants again. In this respect, they have started out on a road to the city from which they won’t return."

"When there is no possibility of finding work by which they can settle in the city, the meaning comes crashing down: the road ahead is blocked, the road back is already closed. The second generation of
migrant workers are trapped."

Yip says the Chinese media may have also fueled a contagion effect of copycat suicides.

He said the media, particularly in more freewheeling southern China, has in recent years been pushing the limits on government censorship in reporting suicides and other news that was once off-limits.

"I think the mass media itself is one of the problems that may have triggered it [the spate of suicides]," said Yip, while emphasizing that the work environment was also critical. He said it's unclear how big a role media played since most Foxconn workers likely got news online or from coworkers.

At Foxconn's annual shareholders meeting on June 8, according to the website Huanqiu.com, celebrity CEO Terry Gou himself mentioned the media's possible role in a contagion effect, also called the "Werther effect" after a reputed spike in copycat suicides after the 1774 publication of Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther," a romantic classic [11] in which the protagonist kills himself.

Some commentators [12] have dismissed that theory as an attempt by Foxconn to dodge its responsibilities.

But the "suicide cluster" phenomenon and the triggering role of the media is well-documented [13]. A World Health Organization guide on reporting suicides for the media cites some 50 studies since the 1970s establishing a link between media coverage of suicides, especially a celebrity suicide, and copycats that follow.

One of the experts invited by Foxconn to inspect their campus in April and give advice was Yeh Ya-hsing, chief of the mental health division at Taiwan's John Tung Foundation. She said working conditions need to be improved at the factory, but added that generational change also played a part.

"It's very complicated. I don't think it was just work pressure," she said of the spate of suicides. (Yeh said Foxconn covered the expenses for her trip.)

She likened China's post-80 and post-90 kids to Taiwan's "strawberry tribe," youth born in the 1980s or later who are so named because they're seen as softer and less resistant [14] to pressure than their elders.

She said the new generation is much more creative than their elders on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, but that Taiwanese kids have the advantage of living in a freer society with more opportunity. "The gap between what they dream of doing and what they actually can do is smaller in Taiwan," said Yeh.

She said she doesn't know to what extent Foxconn workers were exposed to media reports on the suicides. But Foxconn workers she talked to said they spent up to four of their off-hours a day online, and that the company gave free internet time to workers who excelled. The Foxconn suicides did appear to be a classic case of "contagion," Yeh said, and media can help minimize the problem.

Yeh and other experts are careful not to scapegoat the media for such suicides. But they have long urged journalists and editors to be cautious because graphic reporting, such as splashy front page
coverage and photos, can be a trigger that pushes already suicidal readers or viewers over the edge. Such reporting can provide a ready-made model, a step-by-step plan to follow, and a method to the troubled and vulnerable, they say.

Hong Kong and Taiwan, with their sensational, often gory tabloid coverage, offer plenty of examples. Charcoal-burning shot up in the region as a suicide method after Hong Kong cases received sensational media coverage in the late 1990s. A specific island in Hong Kong became a preferred "suicide destination" after lurid media reports. And a Hong Kong movie star and famous Taiwan entertainer inspired a rash of copycat suicides after killing themselves in 2003 and 2005.

But Yuen-Ying Chan, director of the University of Hong Kong's Journalism and Media Studies Centre, rejected the notion that the media played any significant role in the Foxconn suicide streak. She said working conditions at the factory were the "crux of the issue," as well as generational change and the "rising expectations" of new workers, and other factors. "It's a complicated issue, I don't think there's any one reason," she said.

If there was a media role, it was "minimal," she said, given the Chinese government's media controls. "Today, people communicate via text messages with the one or two cell phones they own," Chan wrote in an email. "Anger, frustrations and despair could be easily communicated at warp speed. If there's any contagion effect, personal communication, instead of mass media, would have played a bigger role."

The Chinese government took action to curb media reports [15] on May 27, according to the South China Morning Post, whether out of concern for copycat suicides or simply following its typically heavy-handed approach to information control.

That evening, provincial and central government propaganda officials banned media outlets from doing any more reporting on the Foxconn suicides, instructing them to use only the state-run Xinhua wire service's reports, the Post said. The John Tung Foundation's Yeh said she believes the government gave the orders in order to try to prevent further suicides.

And the Hong Kong Jockey Club's Yip suggested this may be one area in which China's busybody censors might actually have had the right approach.

"That might be the best way to do it — out of sight, out of mind," said Yip. "In Hong Kong, we have to argue with news reporters about what they should put in their reports [on suicides]. They say 'you're violating my freedom of expression.' I say 'no, we're protecting a wonderful group of people.'"

A Foxconn spokesman in Taiwan did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.

Original site

China sex crackdown

Chinese Crack Down on Sexual 'Licentiousness'

AOL News

TAIPEI, Taiwan (June 11) -- Chinese authorities have brought a charge of "group licentiousness" against a 17-year-old girl accused of participating in sex parties with multiple male students, according to a report in the English-language China Daily.

The case marks the second time in recent weeks that the offense, a relic of China's Cultural Revolution, has been invoked in court, after a "swingers" case drew media attention in late May.

Before that the charge, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in jail, hadn't been used for some 20 years, reports said.

Sexuality experts say the dusted-off offense is a leap backward for China's modernization drive, reflecting Beijing's effort to maintain social order amid the dizzying social changes brought by a sexual revolution and the Internet explosion in China.

Frederic J. Brown, AFP / Getty Images

A woman steps out of the Boutique De L'Amour sex shop in Beijing. Stores selling sex paraphernalia are on seemingly every block in many parts of Beijing, catering to what experts say is a swelling sexual revolution led by a growing middle class.

"On certain well-publicized cases, the government is using an iron-fisted reaction to show that it's still in control," said Josephine Ho, coordinator of the Center for the Study of Sexualities at Taiwan's National Central University.

"China has undergone a lot of changes, and the people as well as authorities all feel a certain uneasiness -- people aren't sure which way and how far it will go."

China Daily reported that a female sophomore at a vocational school in southern China has been put on trial in the city of Guangzhou for allegedly participating in orgies on several occasions. A video of one of the sex parties was posted on the Internet in February, leading school authorities to ask the student to quit or transfer to another school.

The girl's lawyer says she was not a willing participant in the orgies, China Daily reported. The girl's father said his daughter was forced to take the drug ketamine, filmed without her consent and then blackmailed into participating in more sex parties.

The father sought help from police in early March, only to see his daughter detained on March 15 for organizing sex parties and held for 25 days. Hearings on the case opened Monday, the paper reported.

The case follows a guilty judgment and a 3 1/2-year jail sentence on May 20 on the same charge against a professor who organized "swingers' parties." The professor and 21 other people were charged in a court in the eastern city of Nanjing, which handed out lesser jail terms for 18 of them and exempted the other three from punishment because they turned themselves in, according to China Daily.

In a commentary translated at Danwei.org, one of China's top sexologists, Li Yinhe from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, wrote that "group licentiousness" was "the last draconian law" left over from the Cultural Revolution and should be abolished.

The charge was originally a sub-clause under the broader crime of "hooliganism" and carried the death penalty for the orgy organizer and jail terms of 15 years to life for other participants, she wrote. "Hooliganism" once include any extramarital sexual relations, but that broader charge was scrapped in 1997, leaving only the group sex crime on the books.

Li said the group sex crime was "absurd and out-dated," characterizing it as one of several victimless sex crimes.

"No matter how much it offends social customs, the private, voluntary, victimless behavior of citizens should not suffer the control or punishment of the state -- such is the public consensus," Li wrote. "In our country that's rushing down the road of modernization, it's so obvious how primitive, backwards and barbaric this law is!"

Ho, of Taiwan's Center for the Study of Sexualities, said a "sexual revolution is taking place in China," with Chinese exposed to more sexual material than ever, especially through the Internet.

"The age of the Internet is both a blessing and something very bad," Ho said. "You get to know you are not unusual, a lot of people are doing all kinds of stuff. But on the other hand, once stuff gets on the Internet, you don't know how widely it's going to be spread and how it's going to be taken by authorities."

Ho said group sex was criminalized in China during the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution as a "counter-force" to preserve the institution of marriage at a time when people were torn from families, moved around, and the family structure was crumbling. "Most people carrying out [Mao Zedong's] orders were young -- it was very important to forbid group licentiousness," she said.

But now, the Chinese state has resurrected the law to show that it's in charge, said Ho -- especially when a case has sparked public outrage. "The media plays a crucial role in calling attention to something and then making it necessary for the state to respond," Ho said.

Controversial sex stories have spread like wildfire on the Chinese Internet in recent years, many relating to the supposed promiscuity of the new "post-90" generation -- referring to Chinese youths born after 1990.

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Internet rehab break-out

Chinese Youths Escape From Internet Addicts' Camp

AOL News

TAIPEI, Taiwan (June 8) -- A group of youngsters hog-tied their counselor and escaped from an Internet addicts' rehab camp in China earlier this month, according to a report in the Yangtze Evening News.

But their taste of freedom lasted only a few hours, until police picked them up after getting a tip-off call from a cabdriver the penniless youths had stiffed.

The story shines a spotlight on the growing "Internet addiction" problem among increasingly wired Chinese young people, and on the many "jie-wang" (quit the Internet) camps that have sprung up in recent years to treat the 21st-century malady.

Cancan Chu, Getty Images

An Internet addict receives an electric shock treatment at Beijing Military Region Central Hospital in 2005. Some of China's Internet addiction programs are run in hospitals; others are fly-by-night operations.

Some of the rehab centers are run out of hospitals with professional staff and support. But many others are fly-by-night operations looking to cash in and employing questionable means, such as administering electric shocks to Web-addled youth.

The Yangtze Evening News, whose story Monday was first highlighted by the website danwei.com, said that China's health ministry banned such extreme shock treatments last year.

The jail-break from the Jiangsu Province rehab camp was planned well in advance, the paper said. Five or six youth practiced for days with a rope. Then, on the night of June 3, they ambushed their counselor, covering him in a blanket and then tying him up. When the counselor screamed, the alarmed youth, fearful of being caught, hit him while simultaneously apologizing to him, the paper reported.

A total of 14 youths, ages 15 to 22, took advantage of the counselor's quandary to make a run for it. Some took cabs to nearby Xuyi County, home of the teens' ringleader. But their well-executed plan fell apart at that point as they had no money to pay the cabdriver.

Eight of the youths were picked up by police wandering the streets, still clad in the military-style camouflage fatigues issued by the camp, the report said. All were returned to the camp, with some facing tearful and ashamed parents. The Yangtze Evening News ran a photo of one youth, his head hung low, facing his crying mother, with the caption, "How am I going to save you, my son?"

Parents had paid 18,000 renminbi (about $2,600) per teen for a six-month stint at the rehab camp. As at many such camps, military-style discipline was employed to try to set kids straight and help them kick their online habits. The escapees had only been at the camp two or three months, but cited bad food, mean counselors and crushing boredom as motivations for their bust-out.

China had 384 million Internet users by the end of last year, with the Internet reaching about 29 percent of the population, according to a white paper released by the Chinese government today.

Psychiatrists differ on whether Internet addiction should be accepted into the medical canon. In a 2009 interview, Dr. Tao Ran, a pioneer in the field in China, said he defined Internet addiction as spending more than six hours per day for three months or more on non work- or study-related Internet use.

He estimated that 4 percent to 6 percent of Chinese Internet users qualified as addicts by that definition. Most of those are youths hooked on shoot-em-up games like Counterstrike (or "Audition" in the case of many girls), or online novels popular in China.

Tao defended rehab camps like the one he runs outside Beijing, saying, "they can help them [teens] build their confidence, become more social, learn to be more respectful and develop group spirit."

Tao said teen Internet addiction was usually just a symptom of underlying problems such as bad parenting, dysfunctional families or personality disorders. For that reason, he insists on treating teens and their parents jointly at his clinic, and administers medication to about 60 percent of his patients.

His patients are mostly Chinese but have also included Internet addicts from the U.S., Japan and Germany. He said his Chinese patients typically withdraw from school and social life, sleep during the daytime and go online at night. "They say they live on American time," Tao said.

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Suicide streak in China

Suicide Streak Troubles Apple Supplier in China

AOL News

TAIPEI, Taiwan (May 25) -- A spate of suicides at a Taiwan-owned firm assembling iPads and other gadgets in China has drawn protests from rights groups over poor labor conditions.

In the early hours of this morning, a 19-year-old male worker jumped or fell from a tall building at a Foxconn factory in China. He was the 11th employee of the firm to do so since late January, and the ninth to have died.

Foxconn is a unit of Hon Hai Precision Industry, the world's largest contract electronics firm.

A small group of labor activists protested today outside Foxconn's offices in Hong Kong, demanding better worker protections at its factories in China and burning paper iPhones in a symbolic Chinese ritual offering to the deceased.

"We urge Foxconn to evaluate its management to improve working conditions in their factories," said Debby Chan, of the Hong Kong-based Students and Scholars against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM), which organized the protest. "It's not only the workers who commit suicide who suffer; all the workers at Foxconn experience this same pressure."

Protesters want Foxconn to make it easier for workers to lodge complaints, establish a better union and raise wages above the current minimum wage given to most workers, 900 yuan (about $130) a month.

The troubling string of deaths -- all believed to be suicides -- has prompted the company, led by president and celebrity billionaire Terry Gou, to bring in psychologists and chanting monks to offer mental and spiritual salve. Meanwhile, the mainland Chinese and Taiwanese media have been full of unflattering reports on working conditions at the firm.

"Who can bring the Foxconn 'suicide express' to a halt?" one mainland paper wrote. Other media have dubbed Foxconn the "go-to-die" company, a pun on its Chinese name. China's CCTV ran a three-part program on the suicides in early May.



The suicides prompted one armless man in the southern metropolis of Shenzhen to write inspirational calligraphy with his feet encouraging Foxconn workers not to give up hope, according to an article translated from the Chinese at Chinahush.com. "To Foxconn brothers and sisters: life is priceless ... there is always a way out," he wrote, according to the site.

One Chinese reporter for the Southern Weekend newspaper recently went undercover for 28 days as a Foxconn worker to report first-hand on conditions there.

"This factory's workers rule the world's finest gadgets' assembly lines with their two hands," wrote Liu Zhiyi, in an article translated by Richard Lai at engadget.com. "But it seems like while they're controlling the machines, the machines also have them dominated."

According to Taiwan's Apple Daily, Chinese Internet users have even formed the "Foxconn Netizens' Monitoring Group," which has called Foxconn a sweatshop and blamed it for nine major problems, including having a toothless union, employing illegal security guards who beat and scold workers, and forcing workers to do overtime.

Foxconn did not respond to a request for comment. But in a rare public statement on the suicides Monday, president Terry Gou told Taiwan reporters "we are absolutely not a sweatshop." He said the company had some 800,000 employees in China and it wasn't easy to manage such a large work force, and that Hon Hai would act quickly to address the current problems.

The 11 workers were all between ages 18 and 25. Rights groups said their desperation is an indictment of a labor model in China that puts young migrant workers from the countryside into dead-end, repetitive and high-pressure factory work in coastal industrial zones, where they're cut off from the support of family and friends.

"Their loss should awaken wider society to reflect upon the costs of a development model that sacrifices dignity for economic growth," SACOM said in an essay released today.

One jumper who survived cited work pressure, according to New China Net; others had mental problems related to work pressure or financial and relationship troubles, according to Chinese media.

Another rights group, China Labor Watch, wrote in a May 18 report that Foxconn workers it interviewed blamed the recent spate of suicides on work pressure, with some pointing also to a "lack of community."

China Labor Watch blamed the suicides on "Foxconn's military-style administration and harsh working conditions, Taiwanese administrators' disrespect for mainland workers, and management strategies aimed at the creation of only short-term jobs." It said the firm "must initiate a thoroughgoing analysis of life on its production lines -- not just roll out more superficial, short-term fixes."

Foxconn declined comment on those criticisms.

Foxconn assembles iPads and iPhones for Apple at its factories in China, according to rights groups and industry analysts, as well as products for most of the top electronics brands.

"When we look into working conditions of factories, we not only blame suppliers, we see responsibility for the brands, too," said SACOM's Chan. "They earn the lion's share of the profit, and also give a lot of pressure to clients -- for example short delivery time and lower costs."

But she said Foxconn is such a large-scale firm that it has the "primary responsibility" for its workers, Chan said.

Asked for comment about concerns of the suicides at one of its key suppliers, Apple spokesperson Jill Tan responded in an e-mail that "Apple takes such concerns seriously and is committed to ensuring the highest standards of social responsibility wherever Apple products are made. The companies that we do business with must provide safe working conditions."

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