Friday, February 04, 2005

Visa Trip

When I came to Taiwan, I recieved a standard entry visa which was good for 30 days, but is unrenewable, so in order to stay longer and change my visa I will have to leave the country. After deliberations, Connie and I have decided that we would go to Singapore, and accordingly will be leaving Feb 13th on 4 day Valentines trip to Singapore. I've never been there before and I'm looking forward to it. If anyone has any recommondations about places to visit in Singapore I'm all ears. ^_^ I'll have my camera and take lots of pictures, I promise.

Actually, I've been remiss in publishing pictures of my environment here in Taipei so far, and will do my best to fix that in the coming weeks. I want you all to have a sense of what this place is like, because it's definitely not London!

Rob

Damn Clever those Chinese

I have to give it to them, the Chinese are damn clever.

When I say this, I am referring to the mainland Chinese government, of course, not to say the Taiwanese or Chinese in general aren’t clever, but the government of Mainland China is currently taking the cake. This was illustrated to me today when I was made aware of China’s response to a political struggle which is going on right now between China and the United States.
To say a trade deficit is forming between the US and China is a bit of an understatement, with the Chinese having chosen to maintain the exchange rate of their currency at roughly 1/8th of the American dollar. If this was natural, that is one thing, but it’s not the natural rate, it’s being artificially forced to stay at that rate by the government of China in order to promote trade. This way, products made in China are almost always cheaper than the competition and of course businesses have flocked to China to have their products and services provided by the Chinese. This has resulted the aforementioned trade deficit, with the Chinese corporations raking in the cash for the past decade or so as Americans (and Canadians) happily outsource everything to China. Money is flowing out of North America like a sieve, and a lot of it’s going right to China.
To Free Market economists, that’s a normal and natural thing, and many think that this flow of Cash to China will only help it to become a Free Market economy of it’s own and promote democracy. Not only that, but American corporations have started to move into China, and American companies are providing products and services to China as well since the Chinese now have the money to pay them for certain specialized things the Chinese can’t do themselves (yet). The Chinese are also now taking their income and investing it heavily worldwide in various companies, again a wise and normal way to improve their fortunes.
This isn’t new: the Japanese did pretty much the same thing during the 1970’s and 1980’s which is where their great bubble economy and prosperity they are known for came from. There are a few differences however, BIG differences which need to be understood and taken into account. When the Japanese (who also used the fixed dollar-yen trick when they needed a steady income) did this they did it with the simple goal of making themselves rich. Japan, and specifically the Japanese companies which were doing this did it independently with only limited government backing.
Now here’s where the nasty stuff starts.
China’s major corporations are NOT independent of the government because of the nature of the Chinese economy. The companies making all that stuff for Wal-Mart like cheap clothes and maple leaf pins are actually owned by the Chinese Red Army, and as a result by default their CEOs answer to the leaders of the Chinese government. So, when a Chinese corporation decides to say, buy IBM’s PC production business, it’s not just another corporation buying that piece of Americana, it’s the Chinese government which is buying it.
Long story short, the Chinese are slowly buying into North America’s economic system, something the free marketing Americans are happily taking the cash to let them do, and in doing so they are getting control of an ever growing piece of the American economy. Once they have a big enough piece of the American economy under their control (and remember this isn’t the most stable or healthy economy in the world) they will basically be able to say “either you do what we like, or else we pull out and collapse your economy”. China will at that point be able to dictate policy to the United States, and at the slightest whim be in a position to remind the US who is holding their leash.
China is not Japan, Japan (and Saudi Arabia, another heavy investor) was a country which wanted to just do business, and so having Japan own enough of America to collapse it was no big deal because it wasn’t in their best interests to do so economically or politically. But, China is different, if the Chinese government (much like the Saudis) feels like pulling $90 Trillion or so worth of business (to pick a random number) out of the US economy and take the hit to their own economy they can, could and will do it. Remember China is led by a very small elite who do what they think is in the best interests of their country and care very little about the common people.
Case in point, let’s go back to the above dispute over the exchange rate between American and Chinese money. The Americans are demanding the Chinese change the exchange rate to one more favorable to the Americans (or at least a little fairer). The response from China, and this is 100% true:
“If you force us to do this, we’ll flood you with 100 million poor Chinese immigrants and collapse your country and economy.”
They are actually willing to use immigrants (if you can call them that) as a weapon of political and economic warfare! They don’t have enough of the American economy to threaten direct economic attack yet, so they are going to use people as a weapon instead. It’s like everyone in Mexico making a run for the border at the same time. Not only couldn’t the US stop it, it would make the American economy fold like a house of cards.
Of course, the Mexicans could pull this off because they’re joined by land to the US, one does wonder how the Chinese would ever manage to get 100 Million refugees to America’s shores without the Americans stopping them….Still, I have to hand it to them, when your opponent’s economy is so weak, why bother to fight militarily anymore?

Oh! And those American corporations going into China, they’re doing whatever the Chinese government tells them to do. Like Yahoo China censoring the hell out of it’s search Engine, and helping to create a giant country-wide version of Net-Nanny to prevent political discussion and anything else which might be considered “troublesome” or “unwholesome” from reaching the public. The gold rule is that whoever has the gold makes the rules, and from where I stand, it’s pretty obvious China is well on it’s way to holding a whole lotta gold.

Thursday, February 03, 2005

Eye Fixations

Courtesy of Peggy, here's an instructional video on how to glue your eyelids up so they make your eyes look bigger and more friendly...The Japanese need to learn there are limits to mulilating your body for fashion...

http://www.koji-honpo.co.jp/makeup/movie/eye_talk_300.html

Tuesday, February 01, 2005


A retouched version of the people playing traditional Chinese instruments from the Grand Hotel...thanks Dave! Posted by Hello

Urban Life

Something that fascinates me endlessly about spending my time in an "old world" culture like that of Taiwan is the stark difference in the realities of urban life between our culture and theirs. Maybe it's because they have been at it so much longer than we have, I mean the Chinese had a restaurant culture 2000 or so years ago, and we Europeans just started to catch up with them a few hundred years ago, but life here just seems to fit together much better than it does in Canada.
We North Americans have a habit of arrogantly looking down on the urban cultures of other places and assuming they're some kind of rural backwater slums punctuated by the occasional western-style structures like a business tower, a Starbucks or a Wal-Mart. Nothing could be further from the truth, these places and people have been dealing with massive populations for hundreds and sometimes thousands of years and while their urban planning skills do often leave a little bit to be desired (as any poor Asian postman will tell you) they have highly developed urban ecocultures which I have to say leave ours in the dust in some ways.
Long ago the people here realized something: that city life is about the service industry, that you simply make money by providing goods and services to other people. Now, that might seem like the most obvious of statements, and in Europe we too had an urban culture and service industry, but when it came to North America, things kind of broke down. Here's what I think happened:
When North American was first settled, it was mostly done so by peasants who wanted a patch of land to farm and stake out their claim on prosperity. Urban culture was mostly left behind (except in ideas brought from the old country) and a sort of self-sufficient rural community mentality was the norm instead. By the time real towns and cities did get around to forming in North American the renaissance was coming to a close in Europe and a new age, the Industrial age was starting to begin. Urban populations in Europe and North America swelled as factories were formed and people swarmed into the cities to get jobs that didn't rely on the vague whims of the weather and the isolated life of the countryside.
So, here we have the cities of the Western world booming with work and people, and of course an urban culture developed to meet the needs of these people. In Europe, this culture already existed, it just needed to expand and evolve a bit, but in North America this culture was something entirely new. The whole Western urban cultural system developed based on the idea that the majority of people would be either working in factories or working to support those who were working in factories.
And, of course, this worked great because there was lots of work and lot of people, that is, until the Great Depression hit and the factories started to close. Suddenly there were a whole lot of people and not a whole lot of work, which as any economist will tell you is a really bad thing because people without work can't buy stuff so money isn't circulating. The whole system was starting to break down, and probably would have collapsed entirely were it not for a short Austrian who decided to use the German army to invade Poland.
World War 2 created a whole industry in and of itself, and suddenly there were weapons to be made and people to be sent off to war. The economy boomed, the population problems were solved (dead men don't need jobs) and even when the war ended the boom continued because the economy had been given a massive boost. Factories were now open again producing all the new technologies that the war had developed, construction projects were everywhere, and the culture and economy were back in sync again. Urban life was about people who worked for companies and supporting those who worked for companies.
This system continued to work pretty well for a while, and it even survived the beginnings of outsourcing as factory jobs (the ones now too low for North Americans) were shipped first to Japan, then Taiwan, and later other parts of Asia and South America. But, eventually North American's own wealth caught up with them, and it just became too expensive to make things in North America for North Americans. By the 1990's the writing was on the wall, not just the Industrial Age, but the age of stable corporate employment was ended. Now was the time of downsizing, of maximizing corporate profits, things like society and culture and countries didn't matter anymore, only money did.
So, we had a whole lot of people out of work.
In the "old world", this wasn't a huge problem because there had already been a culture there which predated the "factory age" that told people how to survive and live in crowded cities. People just kept doing what they always did, running mostly small businesses of one kind or another, often from part of their homes, providing goods and services that their neighbor's needed, and life (with various hurtles to be overcome) went on.
But North Americans have a problem, our culture was designed ONLY based on the "factory age" and it's assorted service industries. People in North America don't know how to survive if you don't show them a direction to take when the factory closes down because they don't have any skills or family trades to fall back on. I'm not saying this is true in all cases for North Americans or (in the case around me) Taiwanese; there are definitely Urban cultures that have developed in places like Manhattan or Vancouver (mostly areas with limited space to "sprawl" to) which are much more self-sufficient than most.
I have heard it said that in North America we currently have too many people for the jobs and resources available, but I don't think this is quite true. I think it would be more accurate to say that we have too many people who lack the cultural instinct, drive, training and know-how to help build the new economic ecosystem we're going to need to succeed as a people in the future.

It's not that people in North American aren't capable of developing a self-sustaining urban eco-culture, they just don't know how.

Well, more on this topic later and comments are always welcome...

Monday, January 31, 2005


For the first time in many years....Rob has gotten new glasses. Check him out!  Posted by Hello

When you enter the hotel grounds, you have to pass through the main gate which you can see in the background, like everything at the hotel it's pretty massive.  Posted by Hello

The Hotel was too dark inside for most of the pictures to turn out, but I did get this picture of these two people playing traditional Chinese instruments as the serenaded use during brunch.  Posted by Hello

The whole Kang family celebrating Connie's brother finishing his Doctorate in Computer Science, the proud Dr. Kang with his Fiancee next to him. Posted by Hello

Rob and Connie in front of the Largest Chinese old Style Hotel in Asia, The Taipei Grand Hotel Posted by Hello

Connie Stands in Front of the Majestic Grand Hotel of Taipei Posted by Hello

Movie Day...

Movies...

I've seen a couple movies recently and I thought I'd take a moment to comment on them...

The first movie I saw when I came to Taiwan was ironically called "Kung Fu Hustle", which is basically a Kung-Fu comedy done by a guy from Hong Kong named Stephen Chow who is supposed to be one of the funniest guys in the HK business. He did the movie Shaolin Soccer, which I generally liked, although I find can't quite get into his films for some reason, I'm not sure why.

Kung Fu Hustle is the same type of thing, the movie is basically about a small slum in Shanghai in the 1920's where because of a loser (played by Stephen Chow) and his sidekick a small war is started between the people of the slum and the new Axe Gang who control the rest of the city. The movie is all over the place, with literal Looney Tunes gags, hard edged bloody martial arts fights, and a cast of characters that never seem to have any real point except to wander around the screen and fight. The whole movie feels like an odd throw together collecton of fights and gags which is loosely tied together by what might be called a plot.

That said, if you want to see some downright amazing over the top Martial Arts fights, and a few honestly funny gags then this movie is worth renting/buying or stealing your friend's copy. I actually liked it more than House of Flying Daggers, which I saw at New Years and found to be an overrated artsy waste of time. At least this time I was able to laugh between amazing fights instead of be bored.

Next on my movie-watching list was Electra, and I have no doubts that many people out there are asking "Rob, why the heck would you go see that when you know it will be bad?" Well, the answer is Connie wanted to see it, and from the ads I actually got curious. Electra holds the distinction of being one of the few older Marvel characters I literally know nothing about and so I was able to go into this movie pretty clean. Actually, I have to say it wasn't half bad. Despite the 6% rating Rotten Tomatoes was kind enough to give it I really don't think it was that bad. Although, I have to admit that maybe my low expectations were what saved me on this one.

Simply put, if you went out and bought some old Electra comic from the 80's, or whenever they published her stories, and read a story from it, this is what you'd get. It doesn't suck, it's not great, it's basically a simple entertaining action move with some good fight scenes and no major plot holes that I noticed. (Which for a modern Hollywood flick actually puts it above most of the movies I've seen in the last couple years.) About the only thing of note is the actress playing Electra is realy bad in this role, but since the character stays true to the character (meaning no stupid plot driven moments) I will overlook her bad acting.

End result, another way to kill an afternoon or Saturday night but nothing that you will regret if you never see.

Now, before I go there is one more weird movie note...they're pushing the heck out of Howl's Moving Castle here right now, which is the newest Miyazaki animated movie from Japan. (So much for retirement...) I won't be able to see it because it'll be in Japanese with Chinese subs, so no English for poor Rob, but the reason I bring it up is that it breaks the Miyazaki mold in a big way. The main character, Howl, is an old woman and there don't seem to be any young women in this movie at all. I find that really weird, a movie where the main character is a senior citizen and her magical walking castle...What the heck?? I really don't know what to make of this, not at all....It's apparently based on a book by an English writer, I'm almost tempted to find the book just to see what's going on.


My first post

Well, here I am in Citizen Coffee finally putting my Blog into action. I've wanted to start a Blog about my life in Taiwan for a little while so that I can share some of the experiences that I have while I'm here with all of you. However, every time I tried to create a Blog on my girlfriend Connie's computer the menus all came up in Chinese, and which I think I can handle updating things in Chinese, doing a full setup would be a litttle much.

I've been in in Taiwan two weeks at this point, and I have to say that I'm really having a wonderful time. Connie and her mother have been nothing short of wonderful to me and I already truely feel like I am part of their family.

I've been to a lot of places in the last two weeks, too many to list in this initial posting but I will try to slowly catch up and tell you about this amazing city and life in Chinese culture. It's interesting really, I've already absorbed so much Chinese culture that this place doesn't seem alien to me at all, it's actually quite familiar. The only real shock, as usual, is being illiterate, which bothers me a lot. I can't even guess at the pronunciations of things in Chinese, I either have to know them or not, even if the word I'm looking at is English rendered in Chinese characters. That can be more than a little disconcerting, but I am slowly trying to compensate for it by learning the bo-po-mo-fo Taiwanese phonetic system they use to teach Chinese how to pronounce the Hanzi Chinese characters. I haven't managed to pass Grade One yet, but I am working hard on it, and hope to pass by the end of the week. *^_^* As I learn them, I am learning more words in Mandarin, and will hopefully slowly manage to be able to really communicate with the people here. All those lessons I took with Min-Min on Sunday afternoons for the past 3 years are finally starting to pay off as I have found I definitely have a "sense" of Chinese grammar even if my vocabulary is still pretty limited.

Just to give you an idea of the weather here, the temperture tomorrow will go down to a frigid 8 degrees....thats PLUS 8 degrees for you Canadians suffering through -20 right now. ^___^ And that is a cold day. Overal, if you want to understand the weather here, Vancouver is the best comparison, except that unlike Vancouver, during the Summer it gets pretty damn hot.

Anyways, time at the cafe is up, and it's shopping time.
My best to one and all, and I promise to update this page on a regular basis, with pictures too!

take care!
Rob