I vaguely remember that they were going to build Tower records but I’d left Taiwan by then and did not come back for 15 years. I guess that was mid 90s ?
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I also forgot to mention Wendy’s fast food.
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That’s actually a good sign. A "slow news day’ means things are peaceful.
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Her mom still on TV mostly hosting talk shows I think.
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I tried to take pictures many years ago but the gang controlling that area would beat anyone up with bats. As what happened to a Dutch animal rights activist caught with a secret camera
That picture below is accurate. Not sure who took it but I remember it like that and in fact even worse as in some places they were in cages.
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Ah yes the good old days. 
Guy
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Consider my mind thoroughly blown. Holy shit. I’m judging @user86’s parents now 
.
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You can’t judge them today for what was considered normal back in the day. I wasn’t the only kid put in a cage and sold for misbehaving.
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@Whatevah
I left the bit out about animals that was just on another level of evil. Well it’s hard to get more evil than sex slavery
Anyway the average person back then was very friendly. No motorcycle helmets needed. Cheapish vespa’s in a abundance.
And the country was loaded with money, all that MIT stuff was making them a fortune. Democracy and human rights was just around the corner and rents were really low.
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Did not know this case. This time period in Taiwan, crime wise was not good. The crime rate now is much lower now (or so I think)
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I’d rather have news flash about the latest soft serve flavor at 711 rather than a bomb exploding taking a dozen people to heaven.
Pity tragic car accident news have not made people any more cautious, though.
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I think this promo video from 1989 for National Day says a lot about how things were different back then.
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And here is this year’s video.
Notice the almost complete absence of Taiwanese elements in the 1989 video except the weird baseball bat segment. Taiwan is front and center here.
At that time, there was only one value: unconditional and identical love for the state.
Now the state claims that there are many values and ways of being Taiwanese.
Sure both of these are government propaganda. But they also show how much Taiwan has changed.
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1989 isn’t a good example. Taiwan was already democratized by then and martial law was lifted. Try 1969.
Taiwan was very much not a democracy in 1989. Martial law had officially ended the year before but in many ways only on paper. The sedition laws were firmly in place. Elections were not free and fair. Most of the legislature, the president, and the governor of Taiwan were all unelected. Taipei and Kaohsiung mayors were not elected. Censorship was active. The courts were rigged and controlled by the party. The KMT was the world’s richest political party. The party-state controlled all three television stations and indirectly controlled/coopted the major print media. It also owned vast swathes of the economy through SOEs and party-owned businesses.
As just one example, a man named Huang Hua was sentenced to ten years in prison in 1991 for peacefully advocating Taiwanese independence.
Chiang Ching-kuo and his successors probably were trying to make Taiwan a ‘democracy’ like Singapore and might well have succeeded if not for Lee Teng-hui and the brave resistance of the Taiwanese people.
I was here as an adult and saw what Taiwan was like. If you were not born yet, were living in another country, or were simply too young to understand, go to the library and do some basic reading.
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I left Taiwan back in 1989 so I missed all that history. I was only 7 or 8 so I wouldn’t know what went on.
My uncle was out of a job because of the democratization, the national assembly was formally dissolved in 1992. But in practice they became useless a few years before that.
The human right abuses abated around the early 80s, I know a taiwanese who served at the Taiwan garrison command, he said they mostly kept corrupt military officers. The sedition law was basically not applied much at all in the 80s.
It is true that authoritarianism in Taiwan softened in the 1980s and open state violence became less obvious. But here are a few cases that show that abuses continued and the sedition law was enforced throughout the 1980s.
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February 1980: Kaohsiung Incident defendant Lin I-hsiung’s mother and twin daughters murdered.
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July 1981: Professor Chen Wen-chen found dead on NTU campus after having been picked up by the Taiwan Garrison Command the night before. Nobody seriously believes he wasn’t murdered.
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October 1984: Author Henry Liu is murdered in California by notorious Taiwanese gangsters acting on orders from the director of the Military Intelligence Bureau.
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1988: Pastor Tsai Yu-chuan sentenced to 11 years for sedition (connected to Nylon Cheng).
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1989: Nylon Cheng charged with insurrection, immolates himself in botched police raid/arrest.
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I remember when the clubs had to close before midnight. The DPP supportets would sometimes riot, throw petrol bombs at cops , and then the cops would beat them up if there were no BBC cameras or sometimes the cops would just watch while Bamboo Union thugs would beat them up. The biggest riot I saw was near to the immigration office. The mob caught some undercover cops in an unmarked vehicle and…
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