Experts debate Taiwan’s proposed quasi-jury system

By June Tsai

Will allowing citizens to participate in trials represent a step forward in Taiwan’s democratization, or merely serve to bolster declining trust in the country’s courts and judges? Will jury participation help bridge the gap between the general public and legal professionals?

These are some of the questions that have been raised in discussions on the quasi-jury system proposed by the ROC Judicial Yuan in July 2011 and scheduled for trial implementation as early as 2013.

Although the draft bill has yet to be submitted to the Legislative Yuan, skepticism abounds regarding the degree to which the proposal can ensure the right to a fair trial, prevent corruption or minimize unpalatable rulings—issues related to the absolute power currently enjoyed by career judges, and the cause of recent public outcry.

Judicial Yuan Vice President Su Yeong-chin, addressing an April 13, 2012 forum of lawyers, prosecutors and scholars, said, “The proposal is intended to balance judicial independence and accountability.”

Noting that “surveys show that more than 70 percent of the population lacks confidence in the credibility of the courts,” Su said popular participation in trials is an important first step toward enhancing the perceived integrity of the nation’s courts, which are seen as autocratic and above oversight.

Another common concern about juries, however, is how lay people, with all their human weaknesses, can be relied upon to make fair judgments if even judges in their professional capacity are not trustworthy, Su said.

The proposed system, with a consultative jury, rather than a decision-making one, is a result of these considerations, he noted, adding that an official poll showed 78 percent of respondents supported the move.

The proposal calls for five citizens to sit with three judges to hear cases involving serious criminal offenses punishable by death or life imprisonment. The lay members of the panel can express opinions on questions of fact, law and sentencing, and examine defendants and witnesses, but do not have a vote in court rulings.

Although the judges will have the final say on the verdict, they must spell out their reasons when they do not adopt lay jurors’ views.

If the bill is approved by the Legislature, the quasi-jury system will operate on a trial basis for three years in southern Taiwan’s Chiayi District Court and Shilin District Court in Taipei City.

Lawyers and civic groups have criticized the proposal for limiting citizen participation to observing trials, stopping short of giving them power to help determine court decisions.

According to Lo Bing-cheng, a lawyer and member of the Taipei Bar Association, the introduction of some type of jury system has been on the Judicial Yuan’s reform agenda for decades, with most in the field expecting something closer to a full jury.

Compared to the consultative jury system implemented in South Korea since 2008 and the mixed tribunal of professional judges and laymen initiated in Japan—where lay judges participate in rulings on guilt and sentencing—in 2009, Taiwan’s version seems conservative, Lo noted.

“The bill sets too low a target,” he said. “If the goal is just transparency and increased understanding of the workings of a trial, a video camera would suffice.”

With Taiwan’s political democratization behind the demand for judiciary reform, the policy for public participation in court trials should aim higher, Lo argued, “so as to cultivate a civic-minded modern citizenry.”

If this were the policymaking goal, the design would be different, he said.

Moreover, the Code of Criminal Procedure was not modified to support the quasi-jury system, as was done in Japan. “The proposal seems like a convenient means for the judiciary to solve its low credibility problem, disguised as an effort at judicial reform,” Lo said.

Lin Feng-jeng, executive director of the nongovernmental Judicial Reform Foundation, also expressed doubt, given the design of the proposal, as to whether citizens would be able to play a meaningful role in checking the power of judges. “Are they there just to endorse the court?” he asked.

The JRF also questioned the clause that gives judges the sole power to decide whether the quasi-jury will be used, with defendants having no choice in the matter. “Criminal defendants would become lab mice as the system is applied in selected courts and for selected cases,” Lin said, calling for more deliberation on this issue.

Lo was positive about another provision, however—the requirement for an evidence preparation process—that he said should help prevent courts from prejudging cases.

According to this article in the proposal, before the day of the trial two of the three judges and all the lay adjudicators would have access only to the indictment, and not to evidence and pretrial testimony.

One of the judges would work with the prosecutor and defense attorneys before a hearing takes place to determine the legality and accuracy of any direct or circumstantial evidence related to a crime.

The trial, then, would focus on in-court cross-examination of testimony, in an equal contest between the prosecution and defense before the judges and jurors, who would in principle have no prior knowledge of the case and thus would be able to reach conclusions independent of outside influence and in accordance with their moral convictions.

Su argued that this procedure could make the trial process more concentrated and efficient, enhancing autonomy and reducing costs.

The current system, under which judges have access to whatever evidence prosecutors provide, has been criticized for leading to imprudent indictments and biased rulings.

The new approach would also require new courtroom skills, Su said. “For the jury system to work, lawyers and prosecutors will have to use language that even lay people can understand when making their presentations.”

In this way, legal professionals and lay jurors will be put on an equal footing when it comes to making judgments, which will narrow the perceived gap between the courts and the average citizen, he added.

For its part, the Ministry of Justice has expressed reservations about the participation of laymen in trials, in any form. It argues that the quasi-jury system may contravene Article 80 of the ROC Constitution, which requires judges to “hold trials independently and free from any interference.”

For Lee Mau-sheng, professor of law at National Taiwan University, however, this is at most an excuse for resisting change in criminal trial procedures.

“The constitutional stipulation is obviously intended to make trials independent, not from the influence of the people, but from political influences, those coming from other branches of the state power, or even from within the judiciary itself,” he said on a separate occasion.

“The introduction of the jury would effect a sea change in the judiciary,” Lee insisted.

“Prosecutors will have to spend more time and energy locating sufficient evidence before indicting a person,” he said. In addition, more effective defenses will develop when the game between the defense and prosecution is equalized.

If the trial run in the two district courts is successful, once the quasi-jury system is expanded to more courts and a greater variety of case types, the quality of prosecution can be expected to improve, he said. “The result would be an overall reduction in wrongful detentions and executions.”

Lee disagreed, however, with the policymakers’ suggestion that the consultative jury be just the first step toward more audacious reform.

A full jury is not without its problems, he said, reminding reformers how Socrates, the great advocate of free thinking, was sentenced to death 2,400 years ago by Athenian citizens.

“That’s the horror of the extremist form of democracy, which would become a dictatorship of the masses,” he said. As long as the quasi-jury helps generate a feeling of fairness and justice in society, changes in the court trial system could stop there, he argued.

The point is, Lee said, that career judges must learn to use more accessible language, and to pursue their now highly professionalized activities in ways that the average citizen can understand. “Judges have just got to hand down the best possible rulings according to their consciences.”

(This article first appeared in online Taiwan Today June 10, 2012.)

French scholar highlights Taiwan’s ‘liminality’

By June Tsai

Over the past decade, Taiwan Studies has emerged as an institutionalized research field in Europe. Various centers and university programs employing contemporary perspectives have been established in countries such as France, Germany, the Netherlands and U.K., with rationales for studying Taiwan that differ from the Cold War, anti-communist approach developed earlier in the U.S.

This vibrant new scene has developed thanks to the efforts of a group of scholars interested in the democratization of Taiwan and the potential for Taiwan Studies to contribute to research in social sciences and the humanities. These researchers address the question of why Taiwan should be studied on its own, and not incorporated into China Studies or Sinology. One of the most active is Stephane Corcuff, associate professor at the University of Lyon in France.

“The relationship between Taiwan and China, and studies on them, is not one of mutual denial or inclusion, because there are many things about Taiwan that cannot be subsumed under China, which has, however, exercised all kinds of influence on the island,” Corcuff said in an interview with Taiwan Today May 8.

 (Photo by June Tsai)

While Taiwan may appear to have occupied a marginal position in history vis-a-vis the mainland, both geopolitically and academically, Corcuff believes the relationship between the two is much more complicated and thought-provoking—and thus deserving of study.

“You could perhaps say the relation of Formosan aboriginals to the Han Chinese is marginal, but you cannot say Taiwan is marginal or peripheral to China,” he said. Nor can dependency theories or the notion of hegemony used in the study of politics and globalization fully apply to Taiwan in relation to historical China.

“In fact, from a historical point of view, the island has always had the means to influence the relationship with its bigger neighbor, making it asymmetrical but never entirely one-sided.”

For Corcuff, Taiwan’s situation deserves a different conception. He adapts the anthropological notion of liminality to understand Taiwan, in particular with regard to the island’s situation in relation to China.

In his latest book, “Neighbor of China: Taiwan’s Liminality,” written in Chinese and published in Taipei in February, Corcuff elaborates on how Taiwan’s history as a place close to yet separate from the mainland has contributed to what he calls its liminal position.

The term originally refers to an in-between period as an individual passes from one stage of life to another. Corcuff believes the concept, which he uses to refer to a spatial and temporal position as a geopolitical threshold, rather than a transitional period of time, helps highlight the significance of Taiwan as a contact zone between regions and cultures, and its potential as a model for the study of similar relations between major and minor states in geographical contiguity.

The smaller entity is not necessarily subject to the dictates of the larger. In the case of Taiwan and China, the mainland “cannot rely on sheer force against Taiwan, and to reach its goals, it has to offer suggestions, negotiate, compromise and wait.” This state of affair, he argues, reflects Taiwan’s liminality.

This perspective on Taiwan’s position in the world came out of 20 years of work by Corcuff.

Currently working with the Taipei Office of the French Research Center on Humanities and Social Sciences, Corcuff first came to Taiwan in 1992 as a university student, just a few years after martial law rule was lifted, opposition parties were legalized, and the island was experiencing the pains and passions of democratization.

“In those days, what we read in France about Taiwan all came from the perspective of the Kuomintang,” he said. Visiting the island, he found things were quite different from what was depicted in official accounts.

“I somehow felt a residue of the island’s colonial past, but was at the time unaware of how that past has left an issue of national identity,” he said.

He soon realized, however, that Taiwan would be the subject of his lifelong career. “I was curious why people of recent mainland origin—the “waishengren”—did not feel at home in Taiwan, some to the extent of hating it, even though they may have lived here for most of their lives.”

He moved to Taiwan in 1995 for doctoral research on Taiwan’s national identity, particularly the identity crisis facing waishengren.

He conducted field interviews, collected oral histories and probed the dilemma this group faced living in a society separated from their origins and the place to which they felt the most cultural proximity.

To better understand this liminal feeling, that of “being here but not here,” Corcuff examined Taiwan’s history back to the mid-1660s, when the first wave of Han Chinese immigration took place. He looked into the relations between Taiwan, nominally occupied by followers of Zheng Cheng-gong, or Koxinga, who identified with the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), and the Manchu empire on the mainland, as well as the Zheng government’s negotiated capitulation in 1683.

He believes this period to be the juncture when the island began to develop geopolitical significance in relation to the mainland. Successive mainland regimes—the Zhengs’ Dongning Kingdom, the governing institutions representing the Qing court (1644-1912), and the KMT government after 1945—all used Chinese culture to support a political project on Taiwan, and helped shape the identity of its society, he said.

But the island is more than a passive recipient of that culture. “The Taiwan Strait is sufficiently narrow for Taiwan to have taken in successive waves of Chinese culture … but also wide enough to have provoked an indigenization of that culture,” he wrote in a preliminary paper presented to the first World Congress of Taiwan Studies, held in Taipei late last month.

In his analysis, Taiwan’s geographical insularity has rendered it capable of becoming both a conservatory and a laboratory of Chinese culture.

Corcuff said that the conservatory provided cultural materials to work on and build against, but was never a perfect storage of that culture. In Taiwan, he said, “Chinese culture has been indigenized, hybridized and pluralized.”

Moreover, even though Chinese culture is the most important cultural matrix in Taiwan, it is not the first, nor the only one, Corcuff stressed. In addition, in contrast to the Zheng, Qing and earlier KMT regimes, the island today is a democracy with a modern, civic society, he said.

With these realities, Taiwan has come a long way from being a mere strategic object to a state having geopolitical leverage, with which it is able to exercise a “power of words” against self-centered China, he argued.

Although Taiwan’s situation may be unique, similar factors exist elsewhere in different combinations, enabling Taiwan studies to produce new concepts useful in the understanding of geopolitics in other parts of the world.

“The relations of Hindu Bali vis-a-vis Muslim Java, Okinawa vis-a-vis Japan, and Ireland vis-a-vis the United Kingdom are just a few examples,” he said. As in the Taiwan-China case, the more powerful entities in each of these pairings cannot simply impose its will without making concessions to the smaller one.

Taiwan’s liminality also implies that its people may have an informed but critical position toward China. “Which means Taiwan is a good place to understand China and a pivot space in the world in approaching the mainland,” Corcuff said, adding Taiwan is a topic on which China reveals its own understanding of history, nation and the world.

“If we consider Taiwan as a space of connectivity between East and West, between Chinese culture and other cultures, the concept of liminality can be expanded to describe Taiwan’s role in the world.”

Thus, the discursive and geopolitical power of Taiwan makes it an important subject of study, he said.

Indeed, Corcuff’s concept of Taiwan’s liminality was taken up by the North American Taiwan Studies Association to structure discussions at its 18th conference, scheduled for June 8-9 at Indiana University Bloomington in the U.S., titled “Taiwan: Gateway, Node, Liminal Space.”

The conceptualization of Taiwan according to Corcuff’s “historical geopolitics” is expected to call attention to the multidimensionality of Taiwan-China relations, which all too often has been simplified by stakeholders with a political agenda.

In the contemporary political arena, his argument may please neither the KMT and associated parties inclined to stress Taiwan’s affinity to Chinese culture nor the opposition Democratic Progressive Party and others who emphasize historical differences, Corcuff said.

This is because his approach reveals that, historically, Taiwan is not Chinese, but has been included into the modern Chinese nationalist program only relatively recently. On the other hand, Taiwan is not non-Chinese either, as it has incorporated mainland influences into its indigenized cultural resources over time.

“The relationship Taiwan has to China comprises elements of both cultural proximity and difference, with some factors that bring them together and others that drive them apart.” Denying either of these “contrary but concomitant movements” would not facilitate the understanding of Taiwan, he said.

(Courtesy of Academia Sinica)

(This article first appeared in Taiwan Today May 20, 2012.)

Making Taiwan’s aging society productive

By June Tsai

In discussions on Taiwan’s rapidly aging society, the focus has been on the problems of growing old and the services older people deserve after a lifetime of contributing to society. Mature age employment has received little attention.

“The elderly are normally viewed as in need of long-term care, as a target group for social welfare programs,” Chou Wen-chi, associate professor of labor relations at National Chung Cheng University, said March 16 at a Taipei conference.

“However, 85 to 90 percent of our seniors are too healthy to sit idle.”

According to Chou, government polices targeting the aged have been directed at the 10 percent requiring long-term care, primarily because of the perception that people entering the advanced years of their lives are less capable of participating fully in society than their younger counterparts.

“It is believed the most blissful way for people to spend their elderly years is not to bother about working,” Chou said. But this misconception is obstructing the creation of an active, healthy and productive aging society, she added.

The idea of productive aging has been around since the 1990s, when Western scholars attempted to present a balanced view of the potential of older people, according to Yang Pai-shan, associate professor of social work at National Taiwan University.

Demographic changes, slowing economic growth, pressure on government finances and concern over national competitiveness have all combined to make productive aging an urgent issue, Yang said.

Taiwan is one of the fastest graying societies in the world, she pointed out, noting predictions that the country will be super-aged in 13 years, with 20 percent of the population 65 and above.

Senior citizens play important supporting roles in the family, community and workplace, but “in Taiwan their productive potential has been neglected to an astonishing degree,” she added.

Council of Labor Affairs statistics show that in 2011 the labor force participation rate of those 65 and older was 7.93 percent, in contrast to South Korea’s 29.4 percent, Japan’s 19.9 percent and Singapore’s 17.6 percent.

Governments in advanced countries have considered the sustainability of the labor force an important socio-economic issue, developing policies and earmarking funds to create environments in which the labor force of older adults is not wasted, Yang said.

The United Nations declared 1999 the International Year of Older Persons and promoted local action to deal with the problems of caring for the elderly and age discrimination exacerbating intergenerational conflict.

That same year, Taiwan also came out with a slogan envisioning an “ageless society,” but more than a decade later, the government still has no programs promoting the employment of older persons, Yang said. The labor participation rate of senior citizens remains just about what it was 10 years ago, she added.

When confronted with this issue, labor authorities tend to respond that unemployment among the middle-aged and aboriginals is a more urgent problem, she noted.

The nature of business in Taiwan is not friendly to elders, either. Yang’s target group research shows that employers count on a worker’s quantifiable productivity as a condition for hiring.

According to her analysis, in the country’s economic development from a labor-intensive, agricultural society to one dependent on original equipment manufacturing, there has been insufficient investment in employee education, making it hard for workers to prepare for retirement or re-employment.

“There is not much time left to respond to Taiwan’s coming super-aged era, so the government needs to come up with a comprehensive policy framework and integrated action to engage the elderly in social, economic and civic affairs,” Yang said.

“In our times, mature age employment is no longer a personal choice, but a matter of national development and industrial sustainability,” she stressed.

Chou argued that older people should not be viewed as merely a supplementary labor force. “Work helps elderly people both physically and spiritually, contributing to their well-being.”

One of her studies, targeting seniors over 65 in rural areas of Tainan City and urban parts of New Taipei City, found that the major reasons they worked were for an income and to keep active and healthy. They also wanted to stay socially connected and have a way to pass time.

In a 2008 survey of people between the ages of 45 and 64, conducted for the purpose of advising on government policy, 74 percent of those polled said they expected to depend on themselves in their advanced years if their pensions were insufficient.

If that were the case, more than 92 percent wanted to have full-time or part-time paid jobs.

“This shows that a high proportion of the population of those approaching retirement is willing to participate in the labor market,” Chou said. The problem now is what jobs are suitable for seniors.

Neighboring countries can provide examples, Chou noted. Japan began systematically launching “silver-haired talent centers” in 1995, the year it became an aged society, aiming to create community-based employment for senior citizens.

In South Korea, private-run employment service centers have been tasked with creating jobs for elderly people, mostly part-time and social service or education-related. “In 2007 alone, 160,000 such positions were created,” Chou said.

Communities, government agencies and schools could all count on seniors to fill jobs that require experience, patience and professional achievement, given their lifetime of both employment and hobbies, she said.

The work could be paid or voluntary, or even a form of continuing education, community based or for the government or private sector.

“Creating possibilities for mature age employment will force us to reconsider our definition of work,” Chou continued. The way people are required to work in Taiwan—constantly exhausting themselves rather than working and learning at the same time—is not conducive to either good health or self-achievement, she said.

Yang pointed out that community-based, cooperative enterprises that source the talent and labor of individuals of all ages could be an alternative to the profit-driven market economy.

“Government resources should be devoted to enhancing the well-being of every citizen, not to helping a few big companies in efforts to boost GDP figures.”

Yang believes the conventional idea of development will have to be changed to facilitate an age-free society in which the service and work of older people can be appreciated.

Thus productive aging is an issue not just for the CLA or the government, she said. “All citizens should become active participants in their own well-being, beginning by rethinking what it means to grow old.”

(This article first appeared in Taiwan Today April 7, 2012.)

Liberal thinker Yin Hai-guang remembered through his works

                                         (Courtesy of Yin Hai-guang Memorial Foundation)



By June Tsai

When National Taiwan University Press published the complete works of the late thinker Yin Hai-guang in February, many considered it symbolic redress for the university’s past wrongs against Yin—standing by in 1966 when government agents forced him to give up his professorship for political reasons. Perhaps even more importantly, the publication allows a review of the scholar’s legacy to contemporary Taiwan.

“We’d be hard put to come up with another thinker of Yin’s stature whose system of thought developed here, in Taiwan,” Ko Ching-ming, a professor of literature at NTU and one of the editors of Yin’s works, told Taiwan Today Feb. 24.

Some scholars focused on what is known as New Confucianism after the May Fourth Movement, beginning in 1917 in mainland China, challenged traditional Chinese values, Ko said. “But unlike Yin, none of them based their academic careers here, and indeed, in the field of philosophy Taiwan has pretty much presented a blank page.

“Yin’s writings are interwoven with Taiwan’s postwar context, and many of his ideas still resonate today, given the continuing effects of the country’s undemocratic past.”

Yin, who was born in 1919 in mainland China’s Hubei province, studied philosophy during the 1930s and 1940s, and became a faculty member at NTU in August 1949, shortly before the Chiang Kai-shek-led Kuomintang government relocated to Taiwan.

Yin was instrumental in introducing European logical positivism, developed in the early years of the 20th century, to the Chinese-speaking world, according to NTU philosophy professor Lin Cheng-hung, editor-in-chief for the project.

But it was his political choices that made Yin symbolic of a whole generation of liberal-thinking intellectuals who began as supporters of Chiang’s leadership in the war against the communists, but became his most outspoken critics after moving with the government to Taiwan, Lin said.

A staunch advocate of freedom of thought, Yin published articles critical of the KMT’s monolithic rule and propaganda-based education that promoted the Chiang personality cult and recovery of the mainland.

He was a frequent contributor to Free China magazine, founded in 1949 by like-minded Lei Chen, a senior advisor to Chiang from 1950 to 1953. The bimonthly promoted freedom and democracy in Taiwan, as opposed to the oppression seen in communist China, but was later banned, and in 1960 Lei was sentenced to 10 years in prison for sedition.

Yin soon became the target of attacks by other scholars, who accused him of “betraying the nation with words” and “spreading poisonous thoughts against the nation and tradition.” In July 1966, one of his major publications, “Prospects of Chinese Culture,” published in January that year, was banned by the now-defunct Taiwan Garrison Command Headquarters, a security agency, on the grounds that it was “ruinous to social ethics.”

The book applies modern social science concepts and methods to an analysis of Chinese culture from the 19th century on, in an attempt at a science of culture. The book quickly became a hit before it was banned, according to Pan Kuang-che, Academia Sinica associate research fellow, secretary general of the Yin Hai-guang Memorial Foundation and another of the editors of Yin’s collected works.

Soon after the ban, Yin was prevented from lecturing to students; in August, the Ministry of Education offered him a position at the ministry in an attempt to muffle him and cut off his contact with students, Pan said March 3.

That year, Yin was also indirectly forced to renounce his usual claim to a government research subsidy, which had helped cover half of his family’s living expenses. Despite this, he rejected the MOE offer, insisting on distancing himself from all government and academic positions.

“On this hot, stifling island … what the outside world has done to me not only impinged on human rights and the dignity of an academic, but indeed left me no space for response,” Yin wrote in a previously unpublished manuscript included in the NTUP edition. The text details how he was deprived of a career, a stage for his work and even the necessities of life. He died of gastric cancer in Taipei in September 1969, at the age of 50.

“It has taken over four decades for this important local thinker to be published in full,” Pan said. “And the history of the publication of Yin’s writings is a mirror of Taiwan’s socio-political changes.”

The government allowed a collection of his theoretical discussions, “Thought and Method,” to be reprinted after his death, but his political and social commentaries, which had been a source of enlightenment to many in the 1960s, were still off limits. In 1971 these were published in a compilation in Hong Kong, and were sometimes smuggled into Taiwan.

The first locally published collection focusing on Yin’s academic writing appeared in 1979, on the 10th anniversary of his death. Yet even this book suffered censorship, Pan said. For example, an article offering a view on tolerance and freedom different from that of Hu Shih, one of the most influential figures in the May Fourth cultural reform movement, was taken out. According to an editorial note, this was done “under the direction of related agencies.”

In 1990, thanks to the end of martial law and the democratization of Taiwan, a 20-volume edition of Yin’s complete works appeared, with Lin as editor-in-chief. This event catalyzed enthusiasm for the study of Yin’s ideas and efforts to learn more about them.

The NTUP version, in 21 books, is based on the 1990 publication, with the addition of previously unpublished articles, manuscripts and correspondence with leading scholars at home and abroad, including Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell, as well as letters to his wife, Hsia Chun-lu.

“Our aim is to make this edition the real complete works, with discrepancies between versions published at different times marked and annotated, formerly abridged sections reinserted, and mistakes corrected,” Pan said.

“We thus get a complete picture of Yin that helps us evaluate him and his legacy in a historical context,” he added.

For instance, reading the related texts together, one can see how Yin’s change from supporting to criticizing Chiang’s leadership was guided by his analytical mind and unswerving belief in the principles of freedom and democracy.

The attitude behind Yin’s decision—going into the truth of the matter and making judgments in light of it—is sorely needed today in debates on issues of public concern, Pan noted.

“We hope the collection will familiarize a general audience with Yin’s way of thinking,” he said, “and help people apply his truth-seeking attitude to everyday life, thus improving local political culture, tainted as it is with such partisan colors.”

The renewed interest in Yin’s work has also brought attention to his former residence, where he did his best to shelter his family from political commotion and personal disappointment. “He put in the garden, planted trees and paid attentive care to the house that at least offered his family a roof,” Pan said.

Today, a stroll through the house and grounds, where Yin lived for 13 years before he died, gives one a feel for the social and intellectual isolation of his later years.

The Yin Hai-guang House is nestled in the southern part of Taipei in a community of houses built during the Japanese colonial era (1895-1945) that later became NTU property. As the residence has remained almost as it was when Yin died, it is a suitable memorial space and now houses an exhibition.

Yin’s students and colleagues remember spirited discussions at Yin’s house over cups of coffee. “He told us, even if politics is bad, it is important to face it,” said Chao Tien-yi, a former NTU lecturer.

Ko compared Yin to Socrates in his lifelong pursuit of truth, relationship with students and death for a cause. “He once said that without thought a man is but a piece of meat, and people can do anything with that meat,” Ko recounted. “I was so shaken by that statement, and the way he said it, that it still affects me today.”

The memory of Yin and his work, and the many other examples of Taiwan’s defiant trend of liberal thinking, were once forcefully blacked out by martial law, Pan said.

“But this history must be brought into the light, because we need these memories to guarantee the sustainability of Taiwan’s freedom, democracy and constitutional rule.”

                                                          (Photo by June Tsai)


(This article first appeared in Taiwan Today March 18, 2012.)

Taiwan co-ops struggle to survive

By June Tsai

In early February, a group of students at southern Taiwan’s National Pingtung Senior High School launched a campaign to save their consumers’ cooperative from being shut down. They lost in a campus-wide referendum, by a small margin, to those who agreed to accept a chain convenience store at the school, replacing the cooperative.

This is not an isolated case. Nationwide, the number of consumers’ cooperatives has declined sharply, from 4,021 in 2002 to 2,854 in 2010. That year, Taiwan had 4,923 co-ops of all types, including labor, agriculture, transportation, marketing and multipurpose organizations.

Membership in cooperatives in all sectors has also fallen off. At present, approximately 3.12 million people in Taiwan, about one in every eight, are members of cooperatives—in comparison to one in two in Singapore, one in three in Canada and Norway, and one in four in Germany and the U.S.

“Taiwan needs to reacknowledge the importance of cooperatives for the stability and prosperity of a society,” said Sophie L. C. Liang, chairwoman of the Chinese Co-operative Economics Association and economics professor at National Taipei University.

The International Co-operative Alliance defines a cooperative as “an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly owned and democratically controlled enterprise.”

According to the ICA, the cooperative movement has 160 years of history. Since the establishment of the Rochdale Equitable Pioneer’s Society in Manchester, England, in 1844, cooperatives have been considered an effective tool for addressing poverty and inequality. Today, over 800 million people are members of cooperatives throughout the world. In 2008 the world’s 300 top co-ops generated aggregate turnover of US$1.1 trillion.

The importance of cooperatives has come to the forefront today, as the globalized world feels the impact of insatiable human greed and natural disasters, poverty and economic recession, according to Liang.

It was no surprise, she said, that in 2009, amid the crash of the banking system, the United Nations declared that the year 2012 would be the International Year of Co-operatives, to remind people it is possible to pursue both economic viability and social responsibility.

“With members also the owners of a business, cooperatives are the cornerstone of economic stability for a community,” Liang said. She noted, for instance, that credit unions and cooperative banking institutions have been relatively unruffled by the current global recession.

The reason is that cooperatives trade on a more-than-profit basis. “Rather than satisfying human greed, cooperatives care for people’s needs in the various aspects and stages of life.”

While world bodies such as the European Union and International Labor Organization are advising governments to boost cooperative enterprises, recognizing their potential to help rebuild economies, create jobs and respond to social changes, Taiwan seems to be untouched, Liang said.

“But the cooperative as a business model has existed in Taiwan for about a century,” she said. “It’s time for us to review this tradition.”

Cooperatives came to play an important supportive role in agricultural, business and even architectural activities during the Japanese colonial era (1895-1945). Locals established Taiwan’s first cooperative, a credit organization, in Taipei in 1909, followed by many more around the island.

When the ROC government took over Taiwan from the Japanese after World War II, however, cooperatives received minimal, if any, support. “Anti-communist slogans stopped the administration from advocating any institution that resembled socialism or smacked of equal sharing,” Liang said.

Thus, the agricultural and credit cooperatives that boomed before the early 1940s were submerged under government-dominated farmers associations shortly after the takeover.

Despite the lack of encouragement, credit cooperatives continued to play a role in creating wealth for local people. They helped small and medium enterprises thrive, and by the 1980s, Taiwan had more than 70 credit co-ops.

The space for their activities has shrunk, however. Since the 1990s, cooperatives have been transformed into banks or lost their competitive edge to big banks, subject as they are to restrictions on the services they are allowed to provide. Today only 25 credit co-ops survive.

As an example of misguided policy, Liang noted that in 2009 the government allowed commercial banks to handle microlending, aimed at helping people fight poverty, yet “credit unions and regional cooperatives are the legitimate institutions for this activity.”

Over the past 10 years, growth in co-op membership has been seen only in the fields of agricultural production and labor supply, said Chen Jia-zone, an official with the Cooperative Guidance Section under the Ministry of the Interior.

However, as cooperatives receive little media attention, and the general public knows little about them, Chen said, “they are often confused, at best, with conventional corporations, which prioritize profit, or at worst with multiple-level marketing, which capitalizes on one’s social connections.”

Liang noted that “Taiwan’s free market economy has been so driven by profit that care and mutuality have seldom been integral to running a business.”

Lee Kuei-chiu, associate professor in the Department of Cooperative Economics at Taichung-based Feng Chia University, agrees. “Policymakers have been much closer to big companies and consortia, and thus not interested in facilitating the development and education of cooperatives,” she said.

Restrictive tax and labor regulations, the absence of a cooperative start-up loan program, and stagnation in legislation and policymaking to address these issues all contribute to the unfriendly environment.

“There is no national agency to integrate cooperative businesses from different sectors to form a larger-scale, powerful economy,” Lee said.

Singapore, in contrast, uses government resources from the top down to help create successful cooperative enterprises, sharing surpluses among members, rather than having stockholders take a bonus, she noted.

In addition to insufficient policy support, a shortage of people with cooperative management know-how has also impeded the development of the co-op movement.

A more successful local example is the credit-union movement, beginning in the 1960s. The Credit Union League of the Republic of China, with 300-plus unions under it today, is a member of the World Council of Credit Unions.

According to Lee, these credit unions help 200,000 average citizens in Taiwan stand on their own in a society with a widening rich-poor divide.

Another notable case is the Homemakers Union Consumers Co-op. Amid the overall decline of consumer cooperatives, the HUCC had over 35,000 members in 2010—almost 20 times as many as when it was established in 2001—with combined purchases of almost NT$721 million (US$24.43 million).

The organization promotes environmental protection and health by supplying food from small farmers and producers who work in environmentally friendly ways. Its growth has been based on the organization’s efforts to educate consumers about cooperative identity, as well as its sound financial management and effective democratic participation.

More recent cooperative start-ups offer at-home care and household services. “Due to the high quality of its services, a New Taipei City co-op has received more business cases than it is able to take up,” Lee said.

“Cooperatives do make money as long as they really care,” she said, noting that over half of the world’s 300 top enterprises are cooperatives.

“Officials talk about creating the economy of ordinary people—cooperatives are exactly what the economy of ordinary people should be about,” Lee said.

According to Liang, European countries have introduced programs encouraging communities to apply cooperative business models in sectors as diverse as housing, labor and tourism. The U.K. government is promoting cooperatives to generate local employment and meet the challenges of an aging society.

“Taiwan should catch up with this trend, to help solve the many social and economic problems it faces,” Liang said.

“After all, support for cooperative enterprises is enshrined in the ROC Constitution, and there is no better soil for the growth of a cooperative economy than Taiwan’s working democracy.” (THN)

(This article first appeared in Taiwan Today Feb. 26, 2012.)

Film aims to right wrongs involving Taiwan's PCB poisoning scandal

The 1979 PCB poisoning led to the establishment of Taiwan's first consumer protection group, the Consumers' Foundation, which sought compensation on behalf of the victims. (Courtesy of Tosee Publisher)

By June Tsai
In April 1979, a handful of students and teachers at Taichung County's Huei Ming School in central Taiwan discovered they were suffering from rashes, or exhibiting symptoms of chloracne--a skin condition consisting of blackheads, cysts and pustules. As time went by, the number of afflicted increased to more than 100.

Tests conducted on the victims revealed they had been poisoned by PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls. Around 2,000 people from the nearby counties of Changhua, Hsinchu and Miaoli were eventually identified as having been exposed to the toxic chemicals.

The event shocked Taiwan and was considered "the most serious pollution-triggered poisoning event" in the island's history. Today, the scandal is the subject of the documentary "Surviving Evil" which was released in September and screens nationwide through November.

"People believed this tragedy would be properly addressed by the government and that the poison in their bodies would gradually disappear," the film's director Tsai Tsung-lung said Nov. 11, 2008. "But this has not been the case."

Tsai explained that he made this film not only to follow up on the victims, but to remind people of those shocking images from 30 years ago, which have almost faded from memory now. He added that by remaining indifferent to the event, every member of society runs the risk of becoming part of a system that allowed the tragedy to occur and threatens to do so again.

Founded in 1961, Huei Ming School was the first boarding school in Taiwan to offer free education and training to blind students of various ages. With insufficient funding to fill its coffers, the institution mainly relied on donations from abroad to keep the doors open. Administrators were forced to cut costs wherever possible, and this meant purchasing budget-priced rice oil for cooking from a local producer. After about six months of exposure to food produced with the oil, students and teachers began to develop skin rashes and blackened nails. More serious cases of chloracne developed soon after.

A test of the oil and the victims' blood samples conducted by scientists at Kyushu University in Japan confirmed they were suffering from PCB contamination, which was also found to have caused 1968's Yusho, or oil disease, in western Japan. During that poisoning, more than 14,000 people became seriously ill. They suffered from fatigue, headaches, coughing, limb numbness and unusual skin sores. Pregnant women later delivered babies with birth defects. These people had eaten food that was cooked with contaminated rice oil. PCBs had accidentally leaked into the oil during the manufacturing process.

Outlawed toward the end of the 1970s, PCBs were valued for their chemical stability and fire resistance. They were manufactured and processed primarily for use as insulating fluids and coolants in electrical equipment and machinery from 1929 to 1977. It was presumed that PCBs were used at the Changhua County-based rice oil producer, with leakage from a heating apparatus occurring during the refining process.

According to Guo Yue-liang, a medical professor at National Taiwan University, PCBs are a persistent organic pollutant that accumulates in animals and plants. "PCBs are passed down through the generations and can affect internal organs, nerves and the immunity system of a person for their whole life," he said. Guo, who is researching the health impact of the toxic chemicals, pointed out that connecting the pollutant with other diseases remains a pending issue.

Following identification of the poisoning's source, production was halted at the rice oil factory and the owner jailed. But this was of little comfort to his victims. The owner's eventual death behind bars meant that those who were poisoned never received compensation for their suffering and loss. Although the government provided subsidies and medical assistance at the time, victims received no systematic follow-up care, except the 2,000 who were issued "oil disease cards." The card qualified them for reduced medical fees and other benefits, yet when the budget ran out, the card became worthless.

Although only seven Huei Ming School victims died in the years following the poisoning, the number affected stands beyond 2,000. Survivors faced deteriorating health aggravated by their economically disadvantaged status. Social discrimination also dogged them, with some moving to other parts of the country to avoid stigmatization. Some, being afraid of passing the affliction onto their offspring, gave up on having children. As shown in the film, one victim only understood why her children had suffered from years of sickness after the director sought her out for interview. "The social impact of the incidents on the victims and their families has never been researched," Tsai said. "They have been totally forgotten."

The documentary traces what happened to the victims over the past decades. One blind victim, a mother of three and board member of the local Association for the Blind, had to fight against her abusive ex-husband and "maddening" government bureaucracy for custody rights of her daughter. It also shows how another former student of Huei Ming, now a masseur, resolved to make the best out of life by sharing his experience with victims at a conference on dioxin contamination in Japan in 2007.

Then principal Chen Hsu-jin--the first to suspect that poisoned food might have been responsible for the contamination--has been struggling to attract the government's attention and support for her former students and other victims through the formation of a self-help group. Now over 70 years of age, Chen is fighting her own illnesses that she believes are connected to PCB poisoning.

The film's director stated that while Chen and the other surviving victims have learned to live with the poisoning, they are now faced with a bigger challenge. "The victims are confronted by two evils," Tsai said. "Their poor health and society's indifference to their plight." He explained that the lack of research into the disease and its impact means the "evils" of the poisoning and ensuing injustice also survives to this day.

"Their experience is significant for each one of us. Given that various toxicities, such as dioxin, have also infiltrated into the soil and became part of our environment, we may actually be living with poisons too," Tsai cautioned. "If the victims had received ongoing care, the poisoning issue would not be an issue today."

Yet it seems easier to forget than to care. The film opens with a voice-over: "Isn't the melamine contamination outbreak a repeat of PCB poisoning in Taiwan from 30 years ago? And isn't the latter a repeat of what happened in Japan 40 years ago? Unless we remember the past, the next tragedy is just around the corner." It closes with a message laden in significance for Taiwan's leaders, "[we don't know] whereto people with eyes will lead Taiwan, but blind people will definitely find their own way."

The film makes a clear political allusion, paralleling Taiwan's process of democratization with the survivors' lives. Tsai lamented that during the past 30 years, political dissents of yore became government leaders and lost power again. Past rulers stepped down but were back again. Taiwan grows rich, yet something is cast into oblivion--victims of degraded environments.

Though some critics doubted the necessity of including political comments in the film, the director said he chose to do so because in a broader sense, politics contributed to the "surviving evil" of the food contamination and its social consequences for affected people, and politics is the key to redressing them.

In Japan, an act was passed to compensate victims of Yusho in 2006, and a comprehensive investigation started this year. In Taiwan, "Surviving Evil" is hoping to raise public awareness of the decades-old tragedy. In response to the film, social activists on the island have launched the process of starting a civic organization to support victims through medical assistance, daily care, legislation lobbying and international networking.

"For me, politics involves achieving the public good. We have to care and make demands on politicians and the government. That is our responsibility," Tsai concluded.

(This article first appeared in Taiwan Journal Nov. 21, 2008.)