Friday, March 4, 2011

If you can't say something nice...

Lynch mobs, I mean... protest groups have now taken up the cause against Lindsey Craig's article on her cultural shock during her time in Taiwan. A "226 protest of media bias Gazette in Montreal” has been set up on Facebook "calling on foreign nationals living in Taiwan teaching foreign languages to contact the group to lodge a protest against the newspaper."  I wonder what kind of response they will get.   Apparently this has become a big news item in Taiwan (as anything slightly anti-Taiwanese does.) Here's the story in the Taipei Times.

I wish we could have a response like this when similar things come up in the Taiwan press. Take for example this story exposing a love affair gone wrong between an AIT worker and a local Taiwanese woman.  The original story is in Chinese but there is analysis by Michael Turton in English, the blog I found the story on.  As he points out the newspaper also ran editorials with 'experts' who made statements such as '90% of foreigners in Taiwan are losers.'  Kind of a double standard, don't you think?  There is further follow up by Turton here.

I remember at the time saying to someone when I read these articles.  "If this kind of stuff was done in Canada there would be a huge protest."  Well, the 226 Facebook group is here. Told ya so...  I wish them all the luck in their protests--of course, for 'foreigners' living in Taiwan, it is against the law to protest (you can't become a citizen) so we'll just have to put up with the situation for now.

CORRECTION:  Thanks to Steven who pointed out that, yes, you can become a citizen--I personally only know of two 'westerners' who had to really fight for special circumstances.  I should have written 'almost impossible' when compared with Canada and other countries (which was my point).

1 comment:

  1. "You can't become a citizen."

    You can, it's just that the requirements are unreasonable, so very few Westerners naturalize as ROC citizens. Tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of Asians have done so.

    ReplyDelete