Morning tea with Tsai Ing-wen

Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) spoke to a group of foreign residents in Taipei yesterday morning. She first spent some time outlining her vision for Taiwan before taking questions from the floor.  Tsai is currently on leave from her position as chair of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) as she competes in the party’s primary for the presidential nomination. The primary will be decided by opinion polls conducted in the next few days with the announcement of the result expected on 4 May.

In outlining her vision for Taiwan, Tsai focused mainly on relations with China and economic policy. She had some interesting ideas about Taiwan’s future economic development.

On the issue of jobs Tsai said, “We don’t have enough jobs and enough good jobs. Despite the fact you may be able to find a job, you may not be able to find a job with good pay. So the quality of jobs is important too.” Tsai then discussed how this was related to the structure of the economy. Since the 1990s as Taiwanese businesses and capital moved to China the restructuring of the economy was delayed.

This led to Tsai mentioning the effect of large numbers of Chinese tourists coming to Taiwan. “With the outward movement of industrial production to China we are exporting higher pay, better jobs to China. With the inflow of Chinese tourists we are actually importing lower pay service jobs,” Tsai said.

Tsai presented some of her ideas for creating better jobs in Taiwan. These revolved around promoting R&D industries and locating these in rural areas. She also mentioned encouraging artists to move to rural areas. Tsai also mentioned the importance of agriculture. She said Taiwan needs more professional farmers and that people from the cities need to move to the country to get involved in agriculture. These ideas are laudable but I would like to see some more concrete details of the policies.

Families of murder victims speak at forum in Taichung

Four members of the organisation Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights (MVFHR) from the United States spoke at a forum in Taichung last night. They talked of their experiences as victims of murder and violent crime and how they came to be activists against the death penalty. It is a common assumption that the families of murder victims would all support the death penalty. However, the speakers showed that this is a false assumption and they all sought to affirm the importance of human rights and the value of human life.

Aba Gayle began by speaking about her personal experience following the murder of her 19 year old daughter Catherine. For eight years following Catherine’s murder Gayle she experienced what she called “eight years of darkness.” She was consumed with anger. Gayle said anger is a normal part of the grieving process but many families become stuck in it.

Eventually Gayle began a process of healing through practice of meditation and study of the world’s wisdom traditions. She went on to write a letter to Douglas Mickey, the man who murdered Catherine. In the moment of sending the letter all the feelings of anger were gone and she felt peace, love and joy, she said. She then went to visit Mickey in prison and resolved to become an advocate for the men on death row.

Subtitles translated for TAEDP

I translated the English-language sub-titles for this video for the Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty (TAEDP). The video is about a case in Korea where a woman was able to forgive the man who murdered her daughter. TAEDP have worked tirelessly to abolish the death penalty in Taiwan. While they haven’t yet been successful they and done a lot of work to ensure legal review of death penalty cases and build international pressure on Taiwan.

Lin Hsin-yi (林欣怡), the executive director of TAEDP, is a great human rights activist. Campaigning against the death penalty in Taiwan does not help one to win any popularity contests. However, Hsin-yi has shown great dedication and extraordinary equanimity even when she has been threatened. She speaks about her work in this video.