It’s good to be cautious but the gap is way too wide for her to lose. 2018 was different. DDP wasn’t doing well in polls at all. Trump and Clinton in 2016 isn’t comparable either at all since Trump was very close to Clinton in most polls.
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You and me both bro. REALLY hope tsai wins, but i am super worried about teh eay the society is now they wont see it and/or show up.
If Tsai does win, i will be insanely relived. I might not even take pollution photos for Gain, for a month!
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It’s relieved.
You probably wouldn’t be able to anyway for the lack thereof.
Anyway I want Tsai to win but the way ppl in my echo chamber have been acting is fucking cringey. They are legit in love with her which is pretty laughable.
The only politicians worth loving are Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron and I am not referring to their politics.
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Hehe. I hope so bro!
And for all the fake energy bs i dont believe in i wont jinx it all by commenting on your pollution observation.
I agree that those ultra tsai suporters are tiring at best. Not so unlike the korean supporters. One side makes you angry, the other makes you speechless.
There are two different forms of Chinese tourism
Tour Groups: They come from anywhere in China on cheap tours where they stay in Chinese own hotels and visit the same restaurants. This is a heavily corrupted industry and the tourists are not from the higher spectrum of Chinese society(rude, loud, uncivilized)
Individual Tourists: Before, 7000 visas were available per day for individual tourists. Originally was only those from top 10 cities and then was extended to top 48. These tourists can stay and eat wherever they want and generally are polite and high spending.
His narrative is clear and bullshit:
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Taiwan used to be one of the four little dragons of Asia
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In the martial law era when they grew up the economy was booming. Nobody cared about politics, they just worked hard and everyone could make money.
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Since democracy and consequently DPP, everything has got worse. The economy has got worse.
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Look at China, they are booming and rich like we used to be. Everything is better there than here
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They have lost their identity and are not allowed to fly their flag anymore and are losing their culture(Chinese)
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So lets get back to the good old days before democracy. Lets get closer to China and then everything can be happy again.
He creates such a clear and emotive narrative for morons. Completely ignoring that just after Taiwan became democratic, a whole business class and industry moved to China and most of the investment in the economy here. Taiwan couldn’t compete anyway at the low end of the industries that China was entering.
How can any country’s economy do as well as before in those conditions?
These people are just selfish and stupid. Many of the older ones have money, more than young people. They dont care about society or the future, only themselves
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Taiwan is doing better than ever!
Taiwanese never had a better standard of living than now. The country has a thriving democracy with many new parties.
Stick it up yourcakehole Korea Fish and Chinese cronies! KMT and China don’t own Taiwan , if you don’t like it fuck off to China !
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Taiwan is a great place. We all know that. All it needs is people to actually believe in here and it will flourish. If Taiwan did that the talent from overseas would come back.
We all live here. We all have traveled and we know what the world is like. Taiwan is great and has potential to get even better.
But Taiwanese news is full of people saying that Taiwan is bad, Taiwan is dying, anyone with talent has gone to China and only the losers stay here, our young people are garbage… blah blah blah.
And people who never travel and have no idea what is really happening in the world believe it.
Frustrating for a foreigner and must be worse for Taiwanese with a brain.
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Taiwan is a great place. We all know that. All it needs is people to actually believe in here and it will flourish.
100% agree. Taiwan in many ways feels like it’s an insecure teenager, as a country it wants to be anything except what it is. I’d like for Taiwan to stop trying to be like China, or Japan, or Korea etc. and embrace what it has and what is unique about it. Not 100% what that means in practice but I’m hoping some of you get my point 
For instance, the erasure of languages other than Mandarin. They’re trying to make English into a national language which is laughable to me - supporting more Hokkien, Hakka, aboriginal languages etc. would make Taiwan so much better/cooler/culturally rich.
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I mean Taiwan needs to open up to the world more and better English is really important for that and moving away from reliance on China.
Identity stuff and language is tough in Taiwan because of the history. A lot of people here grew up in a country named the ROC which is dead now and feel a loss regarding their Chinese identity. Which i think is fine and should be respected as long as they dont want to sell this place to the communists.
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Economy was booming everywhere in the west in the '50-60’s of past century.
Taiwan had an economic miracle and experienced the same level of meteoric growth that we saw in China over the last twenty years. From a third world banana republic to a developed modern nation in a couple of decades.
This was mostly under Chiang Ching Kuo. Taiwan had a special relationship with the US and had financial support so were able to build huge infrastructure projects and attract business from around the world. Everything was booming and flourishing in that time.
Its easy to understand why people miss that time. The dont see that a lot of this was luck and being in the right place at the right time.
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English is basically a national language in Scandinavia and it only helped them get more competitive economically. Taiwan would be so much more appealing to immigrants if English was more common.
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National identity always changes. Just look at Japan, no one ever tried harder to keep their culture but they only became a world power once they opened up and tried to learn from others. They messed up one more time, trying to keep immigrants away and that failed as well. Can’t stop the inevitable.
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yes and don’t forget more annual leave, pay overtime, more public holiday and better housing.
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Right, I’m not denying that English is incredibly helpful to a country’s economic opportunities/growth. But it still feels really weird to me that they’re trying to make it a national language when practically nobody really speaks it, let alone speaking it at home (foreigners and immersion schools aside). This could be a whole thread of its own, I think…
Anyway, I was just trying to make the point that I think Taiwan should focus on what makes it unique and embrace that rather than trying to change itself to fit what it thinks it ‘should’ be. Which, at least to me, is the vibe I get from Taiwanese people and some policies. People ask why I came to Taiwan in an incredulous tone because they think Taiwan sucks and are constantly thinking ‘Why can’t we be like [some other Asian country]?’, and if they were in my position and had a choice to go to multiple countries, they would definitely choose somewhere else.
Maybe I didn’t choose the best example with how complicated Taiwanese language/identity politics are 
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It seems you guys have not heard about the expansion of mother languages programs in local elementary schools. Aside from choosing Hakka or Taiwanese -hoklo- they have introduced Vietnamese, Indonesian, Etc. English is always there, if quality varies according to school resources, but Spanish is gradually becoming more popular, believe it or not.
Problem with English is methodology, scope, children per classroom density. With better programs and implementation towards communication, not testing, it would be a different story. But nowadays elementary school kids do homework until 9 or 10, while their high school counterparts are just leaving school at that time. How many of you have had the experience of being discovered in a public place by a traumatized child who mechanically starts reciting the alphabet or other incongruous list upon sight of a foreigner?
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Ugh, there is nothing I hate more about Taiwanese than this.
You are right, your previous post just wasn’t clear that’s all.
Problem with English is also who’s teaching it and the expectations from it. As an FET (MOE foreign English teacher) I would say the schools and government genuinely believe that a white face in the school is an indicator of student English success. I like to believe that I’m doing my best, but in reality, most FETs could (if wanting to), show up to school only for their classes, play YouTube clips most of class, sometimes try to teach some games, and go home. I will say that is what 99% of the Fulbright ETAs I’ve met have resorted to (nothing on them, they thought they were coming here as assistants, not full time solo teachers. funny jokes.) Meanwhile, any county government with a few foreign teachers will claim that all of their schools are “bilingual” and show pictures of smiling children around a white person to prove it. I have been to quite a few school and county government meetings where my face has shown up on a PPT and the person presenting says something to the extent of “and, as you can see, the students are getting much better at English because of our foreign teacher”. And we can see this from the photo how, exactly?
Meanwhile, the local Taiwanese English teachers stand at the front of the room talking at kids in Chinese, half of whom are asleep, then yell at them when they can’t remember how to spell any of the words that they have never been taught. Or when they fail the textbook-supplied test that I would probably fail too, because most of the content is literal nonsense. The more a student is subjected to Taiwanese English teaching, the worse their understanding that English is used to communicate becomes.
Point is, unlike basically every county in Europe, Taiwan’s English education set-up actively squashes out a Taiwanese child’s ability to learn English. “豬” (That’s what they say for “D” on multiple choice tests) is not the answer to the question “where are you from?”, yet most of my students seem to think that’s the only way to answer that question.
If Taiwan ever wants to even be “functionally competent” in English, the first thing they need to do is give their own (Taiwanese) English teachers Startalk or other sensible, effective language teaching training and immediately remove the license or ability to set foot in the classroom again for anyone who uses Chinese in the classroom more than 50% of the time. (I’m being lenient here - ACTFL says no less than 90% of class time should be spent in the target language). They should also carefully monitor the effects of foreign English teachers. I love my job (usually), but other than a small handful of kids who talk to me in English at every opportunity they get (who learned English on their own anyway), I don’t think my presence is actually doing anything for the English skills of everyone else. The county government would NEVER admit that though.
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I agree with all your saying. Almost point for point. But perhaps the reason they dont see why niw is because they arebtrapped inside their bubble. Hence making english more important. Not saying its great for every country to take ina foreign language, but taiwan needs both foreign friends and foreign perspective to understand their situation. If these old generations keep listening to the propaganda on the radio and tv, it is no wonder they get wet over korean fish 
so if its a call between engliah or french or japanese or whatever, probably English will be the most useful for us in taiwan to get out of this hole.
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