Taiwan's China envy

Controversial Chinese philanthropist visits Taiwan, highlighting wealth gap and "new poor."

Global Post, Jan. 30, 2011

TAIPEI, Taiwan — You might think Taiwan would welcome a wealthy visitor who wants to pass out money to the poor. But you’d be wrong.

The island was abuzz last week over the visit of one of China's top philanthropists, Chen Guangbiao, who is well-known for his flashy style. The controversy highlights the still awkward relations across the Taiwan Strait, as well as the growing rich-poor gap on both sides.

Chen insists he merely wants to return the generosity of Taiwanese who have helped China, for example with huge donations after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. But several objections have emerged from Taiwan's rowdy political and media arena.

Some think he's tasteless and disrespects the poor by making such a show of his charity. (In China last week, he ostentatiously passed out banknotes after erecting a massive, $2.3 million "wall of cash.") One Taiwan county head rejected his visit on those grounds, promptly igniting a backlash from angry constituents who were hoping for a payola.

Others in the pro-independence opposition see him as a Trojan Horse, spreading a pro-unification message under the cover of traditional, Chinese New Year generosity. (China claims Taiwan as its territory; Taiwan insists it's an independent state.)

Such critics pointed to his itinerary, which avoids the pro-independence south to focus on several counties in the more China-friendly north. And then there's the inscription on the 50,000 "red envelopes" he's using to distribute cash, which according to Taiwan media reports reads in part "the Chinese race is one family."

Chen denied any political motive, telling reporters, according to the Taipei Times: "I don’t know anything about propaganda for Chinese reunification. I only know about charity and environmental work. I just want to do good.”

Beneath the moral and political indignation, though, there's a palpable unease with the symbolism of Chen's visit. Taiwan's development once far outpaced China's. But as China's wealth booms and Taiwan's stagnates, the island is losing its sense of economic superiority.

Taiwan's per-person wealth may still be far higher than China's, at around $18,500 compared to some $4,300. But growth rates have sagged in Taiwan while soaring to double or high single digits in China. And in the last few decades, the island has seen a growing income gap. (Measured by the Gini coefficient, inequality rose from 0.28 in 1980 to 0.34 in 2006.)

Like other advanced economies, manufacturing jobs have shrunk as factories move to China and elsewhere. Lower-paying, non-unionized service sector jobs have taken their place. The service sector is now nearly 70 percent of the economy, compared to 50 percent 20 years ago. And since the global downturn, Taiwan firms have been increasingly relying on "dispatch" or temp workers, like Japan and South Korea.

The result has been a new legion of "working poor" or "new poor," as they're called here. They may not show up on unemployment statistics. But they struggle to make ends meet with two or even three low-paying jobs, but no job security.

"Those people cannot get help because they're not ill, or victims of a disaster, and they're not poor by the government's standards," said Taiwan sociologist Chiu Hei-yuan. "So they are just helpless — and they hope to get some unexpected help from people like Mr. Chen."

Twelve percent of the workforce now earns less than $700 per month, and average monthly wages are at 1998 levels, according to labor groups.

Meanwhile, highly-skilled workers in the technology and other sectors pull in ever-fatter paychecks, sharpening inequality between the haves and have-nots. "Taiwan's social welfare system cannot solve the problem of the gap between the rich and the poor — especially the 'new poor,'" said Chiu.

For its part, China is seeing a burst of newly-minted millionaires and even billionaires, as a lucky few strike it rich amid the rising power's go-go economy. There, too, inequality has spiked sharply, with the most noticeable chasm between the urban elite and the vast ranks of the rural poor. The top 10 percent now earns 23 times what the bottom 10 percent makes, compared to just a seven-fold gap in 1998. The Gini coefficient is now 0.47.

"In China now, some people can get very rich in a very short time because of China's growing, but unbalanced economy," said Chiu. "The large cities are developing so fast — they can accumulate wealth quickly."

One of those lucky few is Chen, who made his fortune recycling material from the construction industry after growing up poor in the boonies, according to a BBC profile. (In that interview, he also confirmed that he had vowed never again to give money to his sister, who works as a hotel dishwasher, or his brother, who works as a security guard, because they squandered his money in the past.)

He's exactly the type of swaggering, nouveau riche Chinese businessman who rubs some Taiwanese the wrong way. For others, though, all the criticism over Chen's visit is just sniping. One 67-year-old woman waited all night outside his Taipei hotel after he arrived, then hit the jackpot by nabbing Chen's first red envelope.

Amid a swarm of Taiwanese TV cameras, the woman explained that she wanted to take care of her 88-year-old mother, who has lost her eye-sight.

“I’ve never touched so much money in all my life," she told reporters after receiving about $2,300 from Chen. “I’m very thankful. He is a very generous man."

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Asia's unsung flower power

In the last decade, Taiwan has quietly become the world's No. 1 exporter of orchids.

Global Post, Jan. 25, 2011

TAINAN COUNTY, Taiwan — In a massive greenhouse in balmy southern Taiwan, workers pack boxes of 2-year-old white butterfly orchids.

Around them stretch row after row of the flowers, a hothouse battalion prepared for customers in Japan. There, the flowers fetch about $12 each, earning producer Tai-Ling Biotech a more than 30 percent profit margin, according to managing director Peter Liu.

Tai-Ling exports 7,000 to 8,000 flowers to Japan per month with a 185-strong workforce. And growing demand boosted the firm's sales to $10 million in 2010 from $7 million in 2009. "I need to expand into more greenhouses," said Liu, as workers scurried behind him.

Taiwan may be famous as a high-tech manufacturing giant. But in the last decade, the island of just 23 million has also quietly become one of the world's top flower exporters, and the world's No. 1 exporter of orchids. Taiwanese know-how has also powered China's own emerging flower industry.

Flower and flower-seed exports have nearly tripled in value in the last decade, from $48 million in 1999 to $111 million in 2009, according to statistics from the Taiwan Floriculture Exports Association. Those numbers show how Taiwan has successfully married its agricultural past with cutting-edge technology for breeding and mass-producing flowers.

Much of the boom has been in orchids. $87 million of last year's exports were orchids, up from $40 million in 2004, according to government statistics. Orchids account for just 20 percent of Taiwan's flower exports by quantity, but 80 percent of export value, according to the orchid growers' association.

In 2005, Taiwan became the world's top orchid exporting country, replacing Thailand — a spot the island still holds, according to the association.

"Butterfly" orchids, also known by their scientific name phalaenopsis, have been a star export. Exports of butterfly orchids earned Taiwan $62 million last year.

Taiwan firms have also played a key role in the birth of mainland China's mass-produced flower business. Beginning in the early 1990s, Taiwan firms moved across the Strait, especially to the area around Kunming, in southwest Yunnan Province, which has an ideal climate for horticulture.

Taiwan firms typically produce for the Chinese domestic market, and serve as middlemen between Chinese growers and foreign breeders.

Tai-Ling serves the China market from a branch in Shanghai that employs 70 to 80 Chinese workers. Production costs are half what they are in Taiwan, but managing director Liu says Taiwanese workers are far better — one of them can do the job of two typical Chinese workers, he says, erasing the mainland's cost advantage. And Japan remains his most important market by far, he says, because Chinese still don't have regular buying patterns.

"They don't have the habit of buying flowers, except during Chinese New Year or National Day," said Liu. "At other times sales are very small."

That could change soon. Flower consumption is rising 20 percent to 30 percent per year in China, says Liu Bang-shein, managing director of the Dahan Group, a Taiwanese pioneer in China's flower market. That's a contrast with nearby markets like Japan, where consumption is stable or even decreasing slightly. According to a recent documentary that aired on China's state-run CCTV, China's flower market is already estimated at some $10 billion.

Dahan is now Asia's largest company for poinsettias, producing 4 million cuttings a year — 20 percent of China's overall production, and 65 percent of "legal" production, that is, plants produced under license, with royalties paid to breeders.

Amid all the success, though, Taiwan already has its eye on the rear-view mirror. New Taiwanese firms have crowded into the market, increasing competition and lowering profit margins. The Dutch are planning large-scale greenhouses in the United States, which could give them an edge in that key market.

China doesn't export much yet, because of problems with breeders' rights — the right to grow and sell specific flower varieties. Exports without the proper paperwork and licenses are banned from key markets like Europe and the U.S.

"Our plant variety protection is better than theirs [China's]," said Chang Su-san, from Taiwan's Council of Agriculture. "They focus more on food crops, we focus more on horticulture."

But eventually, homegrown Chinese firms could compete in key flower markets. So Taiwan firms are looking to move up the value chain, in search of better margins and an edge.

"We need to keep increasing our varieties and efficiency," said Chang. Some Taiwan producers hope to set up a cross-strait production line, with the first stages of production in lower-cost China and final production, branding, and packaging in Taiwan for export to world markets.

Dutch flower exporters use a similar model, with plantations in Africa or other cheaper locations. But at the moment, cross-strait trade barriers make that business model impossible. Some flower imports from China are banned; others face a 35 percent import tariff, said Parker Wu, a veteran of the orchid business at Orchis Floriculturing.

Wu thinks the Taiwan government should set up an export zone and an auction, similar to the one in Yunnan province or in Holland, to better connect Taiwan's producers with global buyers.

Another focus will be on developing brands. Up until now, many of the island's flower firms have been akin to "contract" manufacturers in that they export small plants or cuttings to the U.S., where U.S. brands shepherd them through the final stages of production, market and sell them. That means Taiwan firms earn only a small slice of the profits.

Branding would expand Taiwan's slice. "In the end, your brand is the most important thing," said Richard Lin, of the Taiwan Orchid Growers Association. "There's still a lot we have to learn and improve."

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Double jeopardy: Asia's death penalty debate

Part I: A murder trial in Taiwan puts the spotlight on Asia's death penalty debate.

Global Post, Feb. 10, 2011

TAIPEI, Taiwan — Japan hangs them. China puts a bullet in their head. Taiwan makes them lie face down on a blanket, then shoots them in the back or skull.

Asia has had few qualms about capital punishment. It put more people to death in 2009 than the rest of the world combined, according to Amnesty International, with “the vast majority” of those executions in China.

But now, movements are afoot to abolish the death penalty. Taiwan and South Korea put unofficial moratoriums on executions, at least until Taiwan put to death four convicts in June last year after an outcry from crime victims’ relatives. Japan has also reduced executions.

Majorities in Asian countries support the death penalty, as is the case in the United States. But several high-profile cases have given people pause. In Japan last year, DNA evidence proved the innocence of a man who had been jailed for 17 years for murder. There are doubts, too, on the guilt of the country’s longest-serving death row inmate.

In Taiwan, the case of the "Hsichih Three" is cited by rights groups as a disturbing example of how police and the courts can get it wrong.

Once hours away from the execution chamber, the three men were found innocent last November in the grisly double murder of a couple in 1991. The only evidence against them were confessions they later recanted, saying they were obtained through torture.

"The case of the Hsichih Trio has raised public awareness of the weaknesses of the criminal justice system and begun to raise the death penalty as a question for public debate," said a report by the International Federation for Human Rights.

From April to November last year, GlobalPost followed the re-trial of the Hsichih Three, attending hearings and interviewing the key figures in the case. Their story is one of high drama. It highlights how the global debate over whether the state should have the power to take a life is playing out in Asia.

And it shows why Taiwan, for all its problems, is considered to be in the vanguard of human rights in Asia — and an example to its giant neighbor across the Taiwan Strait. While Taiwan is moving fitfully toward scrapping the death penalty, China executes thousands per year behind a shroud of secrecy.

An abominable crime

What happened in that room was evil.

In the dead of night on March 24, 1991, Wu Ming-han and Yeh Ying-lan were in bed, in their small apartment in a working-class Taipei suburb. In another room, their 7- and 8-year-old children slept.

At around 4 in the morning, one or more intruders crept into the couple's tiny bedroom. The couple awoke. A violent struggle erupted.

A crime scene reconstruction catalogued the results in emotionless detail, like a spreadsheet of horror. Wu was hacked 42 times; Yeh 37. Her wounds included 12 cuts on the face, 18 cuts on the left occipital, wounds to the left chest, right scapula, right hand, wrists and both arms. His left pinkie was broken and his wedding ring cut off.

Grainy police photos of the crime scene show two bodies sprawled on the floor like tossed-away rag dolls, each a bundle of mauled clothing and gore. Blood runs red down dressers, bedspreads and walls.

Police arrested the couple's 22-year-old neighbor Wang Wen-hsiao, a marine conscript on home leave with a drug habit, divorced parents and gambling debts of at least $1,500. He confessed to the crime, describing a burglary gone horribly wrong. Military courts tried and executed him.

Under intense public pressure, local police also rounded up Wang's brother and three local teens he identified, on the belief that one person couldn't have committed such a brutal double murder alone. All four confessed to involvement in the crime, and Wang identified them as accomplices. They all later recanted, saying they had been tortured by police.

Only Wang’s fingerprints were found at the crime scene, along with two sets of bloody footprints (one of those believed to be a cop's), and one murder weapon — a meat cleaver. To this day, not a single piece of physical evidence ties the three to the scene of the crime.

Wang’s brother served a light jail sentence for testifying against the others, and was released. The Hsichih Three were found guilty and sent to death row. Their lives were spared when the minister of justice — now Taiwan's president — refused to sign their execution orders, citing irregularities in the case.

In 2003, a court overturned the convictions and freed them. Prosecutors appealed, and the three were found guilty again in 2007. Yet another retrial was ordered. And that's where things stood in April 2010.

Read more from Double jeopardy:

Part II: victims' families seek justice

Part III: trend toward abolition

Part IV: presumed guilty

Part V: matter of "face"

Original site

Double jeopardy: victims' families seek justice

Part II: Have anti-death-penalty activists gone too far?

Global Post, Feb. 10, 2011

TAIPEI, Taiwan — The prosecutors in black-and-purple robes yawned, fidgeted, even dozed through many of the High Court hearings.

But throughout the trial, a 60-year-old man with thinning hair, wearing red-framed glasses and a plain jacket, listened intently from the row behind them. It was Wu Tang-jie, older brother of the male victim.

In an interview at his lawyer's office in Taipei in June, Wu said he had attended every hearing he could in the case's 19-year course. A counselor at a Taipei prison, he used his vacation days to represent the family in court.

He insisted that all the evidence pointed “obviously” to the guilt of the Hsichih Three.

How could one person with one weapon have inflicted so much gore? How could the victims’ 7- and 8-year-old children have slept through the horror, unless two or more assailants covered the victims' mouths to stop their screams?

In the middle of the interview, Wu pulled from a folder two large, double-sided laminated photos and placed them on the table. Garish red jumped out first. Then a closer look: a mutilated head and blood-matted hair, in gruesome close-up. It was Wu's brother and his brother’s wife, both 37 at the time of death, in blown-up police photos from the crime scene.

"If people who oppose the death penalty could see these pictures, I think they would change their minds," he said softly. "People who want to abolish the death penalty don't have family who were killed like this, so they don't have sympathy."

"The victims’ feelings, before they die — nobody can know that," he said, peering over the photos. "No one can write it down."

Wu said he thought the death penalty could deter serious crimes. "You will consider that you could be put to death before you commit a crime," he said. "If there was no death penalty, people would do whatever they want."

He said there should be a law to better take care of victims’ families, saying the two children of the murdered couple had “no help.”

He was clearly bitter at how the Hsichih Three had become a cause celebre for human rights and anti-death-penalty groups, while his family has suffered with little support. “We think we are a minority — nobody cares about us,” he said.

"Everybody speaks for people who are still alive," he said. "But what about the rights of the dead? My brother and his wife can't return from the dead. The law should give them justice."

Wave of sympathy

Last March a candlelight vigil was held to show solidarity with relatives of victims of heinous crimes, like Wu. It was timed as a rebuke to the justice minister, who had vowed not to execute anyone on her watch (the minister later resigned amid the backlash.) One of the vigil’s organizers was 35-year-old Chu Hsueh-heng.

Chu became interested in the death penalty while working on a government-commissioned research project that involved online polling on social issues. He started contacting victims' families, digging into archives, and researching the issue.

He said the anti-death-penalty movement had good intentions, and was "brave" in its initial opposition to political executions in the last days of martial law (1949-1987). Civil society efforts eventually bore fruit: Taiwan paid out some $650 million in compensation for more than 7,000 wrongful verdicts during the martial law era, including nearly 900 executions, according to Taiwan’s Humanistic Education Foundation.

But activists had gone too far, said Chu. "In the past three to five years, almost all the people they are defending are not innocent." He said activists and the government should be doing more to give legal help and a support system to victims' families.

Worse, he accused the government of keeping victims' families in the dark, by starting a de facto moratorium on the death penalty without public debate on the issue. Chu called that policy "immoral."

"The government was doing something behind our backs," said Chu. "They were using a loophole as a way to delay the process, and didn't tell the public."

Victims' families "thought we would provide support," said Chu. "But our government didn't do the job well, so they feel cheated."

"Most of the victims' families support the death penalty," he said. "Maybe it's not right by high moral standards. But it’s like closure for them.” Long, drawn-out cases with no result, like the Hsichih Three case, were “like a torture” for victims’ relatives said Chu, and they “want to stop the torture.”

"'Where is the justice society promised me?' they say. 'When I get it, I'll be able to sleep at night, and I can start to forget. Then I can start to forgive.'"

Read the rest of Double jeopardy:

Part I: a look at the death penalty in Asia

Part III: trend toward abolition

Part IV: presumed guilty

Part V: matter of "face"

Original site

Double jeopardy: trend toward abolition

Part III: The majority of Taiwanese and Japanese support the death penalty.

Global Post, Feb. 10, 2011

TAIPEI, Taiwan — Worldwide, the death penalty is on the decline.

In 2009, only one-third (58) of the world’s countries kept the death penalty on the books, according to Amnesty International; only 18 of those carried it out. For the first time in history Europe had zero executions; in the Americas, only the United States carried out the death penalty.

Asia is a holdout. It leads the world in executions, thanks to China. Beijing refuses to divulge numbers on how many it puts to death; Amnesty estimates “thousands” per year, including political criminals. Vietnam was a distant runner-up in 2009 with more than nine executed.

Elsewhere in Asia, though, capital punishment is on the wane. The Philippines abolished the death penalty in 2006. India executed just one person from 1999 to 2008.

South Korea, which like Taiwan has moved from dictatorship to democracy, hasn’t executed anyone since 1997, although it recently upheld the constitutionality of the death penalty.

Activists in Japan are pushing for abolition. The center-left government has only put two to death since taking power in the fall of 2009. In those cases, the justice minister allowed the media into the execution chamber for the first time, and called for public debate.

Popular support

Despite those trends, a majority of Taiwanese — 70 to 80 percent, depending on the poll — still supports the death penalty. In Japan it’s 85 percent.

In a 2006 report, the International Federation of Human Rights (IFHR) found that most Taiwanese explained their support in terms of a "cultural belief in retribution.”

"There is a belief that human nature can be fundamentally evil and irredeemable, that serious criminals should pay for their crimes with their lives and that extreme punishment is needed to curb behavior," the IFHR found. "There is a fear that if the death penalty is removed, the social order will disintegrate."

The IFHR report noted, though, that some 50 percent polled also think life sentences without possibility of parole could be substituted for the death penalty.

Taiwan sociologist and death penalty opponent Chiu Hei-yuan said Taiwan’s capital punishment was rooted in universal ideas of vengeance, but took Chinese forms. Interestingly, Taiwan's Austronesian aborigines had no tradition of the death penalty, he said, but the Chinese who settled Taiwan did.

"In Chinese culture, the death penalty is a very important institution for maintaining social order and the ruling government's power,” he said.

Chinese history is packed with gruesome punishments, such as execution to the “ninth degree” — wiping out an entire clan for one man’s treason against the imperial family. Condemned men were often paraded in public before being killed, and peasants would jostle to dip buns of bread in the fresh blood of the executed, said Chiu. "They thought it was good for your health, and for curing illness.”

Paul Katz, a historian at Taiwan’s Academia Sinica, said Chinese judicial tradition often featured a presumption of guilt. "The idea has always been that if you were brought into court, it was a shameful indication that something was wrong — mediation had failed," he said. "The burden of proof was always on the person being accused."

That was true also under martial law in Taiwan, said Katz, when the Kuomintang’s totalitarian spy and security apparatus operated with impunity. "If you were caught up in the state's web, you must have done something wrong and it was up to you to prove that you were innocent."

Torture to extract confessions from suspected political enemies was routine. Kangaroo courts sent thousands before firing squads.

In that context, the treatment of the Hsichih Three by cops and prosecutors was a reflexive habit of an authoritarian regime in its dying days.

Since democratization in the late '80s and early '90s, Taiwan has cast away much of that troubling legacy. Part of that is reducing the number of people it puts to death.

Executions declined from 32 in 1998 to just three in 2005, according to the 2006 IFHR report.

A thirst for vengeance

In 2005 Taiwan quietly put a moratorium on capital punishment. It wasn’t abolished, but no one was put to death, either.

But last year, public debate was reignited when the justice minister, under legislative questioning, vowed that no one would be executed on her watch. Two prominent murder victims' relatives — including a TV celebrity — took to the airwaves with emotional protests. They quickly attracted a groundswell of public support.

"This was an irrational movement; crowd behavior to ask the government to kill these criminals,” said Chiu, the sociologist.

The crowd got what it wanted. The justice minister resigned in March. Two months later, four death row inmates were shot to death, with the new justice minister saying their cases were extreme ones that had, by a Chinese saying, "made the gods and man alike tremble with rage."

The executions came despite what Amnesty described as “assurances” from the current president Ma Ying-jeou in June 2008 that Taiwan’s moratorium would continue.

Forty men remain on death row, according to rights groups, including 15 who had no lawyers at their final trials.

Still, Taiwan is moving toward abolition. A task force has met to chart the way forward on scrapping the death penalty. One human rights alliance has challenged the constitutionality of the death penalty in Taiwan, on behalf of most of the condemned men (a few refused to be part of the suit, saying they wanted to die.)

Pro-death-penalty groups say that until the laws are changed, executions should continue as legally mandated.

But rights groups make the reverse argument, saying Taiwan shouldn't put anyone to death until there's a ruling on the penalty's constitutionality.

"People who are against the abolition of the death penalty misunderstand," said Chiu. "They think if a guy's not killed, that means he's not guilty. They say, only if we kill him can we get justice. We don't think so."

Read more from Double jeopardy:

Part I: a look at the death penalty in Asia

Part II: victims' families seek justice

Part IV: presumed guilty

Part V: matter of "face"

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