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Pictured above: our first road trip in Taiwan Province, only 1.75 hours from our house. A couple of kilometers past this Hehuan Mountain rest stop, we got to Wuling Pass, at 3,275 meters above sea level. The t-shirt is from a friend’s Shenzhen hotpot restaurant. All the staff wear one. It says, “Being happy is important”. I’ll say.
Sixteen years on the streets, living and working with the people of China, Jeff
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This is Jeff J. Brown China Rising Radio Sinoland, Seek Truth From Facts Foundation, the China Writers’ Group and the Bioweapon Truth Commission. I can also add China Tech News Flash! Today is our second month anniversary of moving to Taiwan Province, China. I wanted to give you all an update, because I had never been to Taiwan before coming here this year. Read the first installment here,
Our first impressions of Taiwan Province, China since moving here two weeks ago. China Rising Radio Sinoland 241107
I just want to give you all some more information. Here is what we like about Taiwan in no particular order.
First off, it is incredibly safe. On the streets, it is incredibly safe. The cops in Mainland China don’t even carry guns. Here the Taiwanese cops carry guns, but the way I see it is, they probably only get to use them at the shooting range. I don’t see them having much reason to use them here on the streets. Nothing to worry about our belongings, our billfolds, our passports, personal and bodily safety, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I don’t even think we would even need to lock our car. We half-heartedly lock the house. It’s just not necessary.
This, whereas we just left France and there, millions of forced immigrants from the south and east of France, are flooding into Europe and they are causing 80 to 85 percent of all the violent crimes there. We’re talking organized drug gangs, selling drugs in broad daylight under the Eiffel Tower, nightly AK-47 gunfights in Marseilles and elsewhere, grand theft auto, stabbings, high speed car chases inside cities, rapes on the metro, rapes in broad daylight, elderly women, 70 to 85 years old, they’re coming through their windows, raping them in their beds, making their elderly husbands watch. That’s all the nightly news is anymore.
The West’s Big Lie Propaganda Machine (BLPM) has recently made a huge deal out of a couple of knifings on the Mainland. A Brit reported that through the end of October, London alone has had something like 88,000 violent crimes, of which 11,000 were knifings. This, versus the Mainland with two? I can already see in Taiwan that it is no different.
The BLPM vomits the worst psychological reflection onto China, to deny the truth back home.
All the crime, the drugs, the gangs, the rapes, the knifings, children being attacked, almost all of that is being caused by immigrants. We don’t have that problem here in Taiwan, nor in Mainland China. I haven’t seen any road rage. The people are very cool, calm, collected and chillaxed. Thus, in Taiwan Province and Mainland China, the streets are super safe. This is a freedom that most Westerners just cannot have, especially in this day and age.
Secondly, the Taiwanese people are incredibly honest at the street level.
Of course, everywhere in the world there is corruption, especially at the higher levels. But in Mainland China and Taiwan Province, the people on a day-to-day basis are incredibly honest. Again, your belongings, your phones, your cars, your backpacks, your purses. I’ll just give some examples. We have a public swimming pool that we go to. In Taiwan, they don’t even have lockers. They have cubby boxes (open cubby boxes). People just leave their billfolds in there and their phones. There was a guy with an iPhone and it’s just lying there in the cubby hole. I leave my phone and money and everything unlocked too.
This gentleman left his iPhone out for anybody to steal, at our community swimming pool, along with his billfold in his pants next to it. Would you do that where you live? No lockers? Only cubby boxes? Taiwanese and I do.
Recently I was swimming, I don’t swim, I do aqua gym with floats. About 15 middle school or high school kids showed up for a swim lesson and they were going in and out of the changing room. About ten of them were boys and five were girls. I wasn’t worried about anything. I had no worries. Can you imagine that in the West? Then recently, we visited a regional park outside of Shenzhen. I went to the bathroom, I foolishly took off my bag that holds our passports, and I hung it on the door hook in the men’s toilet. I got finished and I just wasn’t even thinking. I took off and about an hour and a half later, I’m going, where’s my gray bag with our passports?
I’m going, oh shit, I left it in the bathroom. We didn’t care. We weren’t worried. We didn’t run to try to save our passports from being ripped off by somebody. We finished our visit about an hour or so later, we strolled back to where the parking lot and the restrooms were, and I saw a cleaning lady. Their toilets are just spotless. I said I left a bag in one of the stalls. Do you know anything about that? She says, yeah, go check with the guard right over there in the parking lot. So, I went up to the guard and there was my bag. Didn’t have to worry about it.
Then in Puli, where we live, I left my backpack in a restaurant. I guess I’m too relaxed here now. I’m not fearful of my belongings. I left my backpack in the restaurant. then about an hour later, I’m going, oh crap, I left my backpack in the restaurant. So, I called the restaurant, I was not worried, nobody is going to be pilfering my backpack, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I went the next day to pick it up.
At a crowded breakfast restaurant, a woman got up to go to the bathroom. She left her phone and keychain on the table, completely exposed. She was gone for 2-3 minutes. In the West, thieves would have created a scene to distract the people and steal her stuff, then go rob her house.
Homes are safe. no burglaries and grand theft auto. Are you kidding? It’s just not even in anyone’s imagination. I’m sure it does happen once in a while. I’m sure a car gets stolen or maybe a motorcycle or a motor scooter gets stolen, or somebody may get their house broken into, but you compare that… We know at least three people just in the last year in France, who went on vacation for a couple or three weeks and came back to empty houses. Literally, they cleaned the houses out. So again, street-level honesty creates a freedom that Westerners just cannot comprehend.
When we’re walking down the street and drop something, people literally come over and oh, you dropped this. Convenience stores are safe. There’s no car jackings here. The taxi drivers don’t have to worry about getting held up or passengers getting raped or robbed by Uber drivers. It’s just incredibly honest. My daughter lived in China with us from 2010 to 2017 and then she stayed there until 2019.
I asked her about the taxis, and she said, in all the years we take lots of taxis in China because they’re so inexpensive and convenient. She said that maybe three times when she was sitting in the back seat, maybe three times out of the hundreds of times that she took taxis, three of them made some comments to her about, “Hey baby”, but that’s it. You get a taxi in the United States and you can get raped or robbed. All right. Next.
The next thing is, Taiwan Province and the rest of China, it’s clean. The streets are clean. The sidewalks are clean. Mainland China is a little bit cleaner than Taiwan, but Taiwan, it’s incredibly clean. You go around in the United States and France now, and there’s just more and more garbage everywhere. Trash on the streets and the sidewalks.
Not to mention, I went to Portland, Oregon, USA last year for a Peace Corps reunion. I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Tunisia from 1980 to 1982. There were homeless people everywhere, crazy lunatics screaming and yelling on the streets, wandering on the streets, screaming and yelling, people in wheelchairs who had no one helping them and taking care of them. Drug addicts on the sidewalks were rolling in their vomit, with their drug paraphernalia next to them, human feces all over the sidewalks. All that’s not a problem anywhere in China, the Mainland, or Taiwan.
It’s just incredibly, incredibly clean. The swimming pools are clean. The metros and the trains, you can eat off the floor of a metro in Taiwan or in Mainland China. The parks are clean. Again, Mainland China is a little bit cleaner. They have a lot more people devoted to public sanitation. But again, Taiwan is light years ahead of most places in the West. The swimming pools, the taxis are clean, the trains are clean, the buses are clean.
In France starting in the late 80s, they got tough on people letting their dogs poop on the streets because it was an absolute nightmare. It was like a minefield trying to walk anywhere in a city in France. Yet, they actually cleaned it up. The people got trained picking up their dog poop with plastic bags on their hands and all that. Unfortunately, since we got back in 2020, they’re getting lax again. Now there’s dog crap all over the place. That’s not a problem anywhere in China. It’s just getting worse and worse, at least in France.
Again, that is a freedom that at least the French and the last time I was in New York, San Francisco, look at Portland with drug addicts rolling around in their vomit – it is freedom to have good public sanitation and order. It is a freedom that many places in the West just cannot appreciate.
The fourth freedom that we have here in China is public transportation. Admittedly in Europe, it’s much, much better than in the United States. Public transportation is an oxymoron in the United States. But here it’s extensive, it is well organized, it is well maintained, and it’s not expensive.
China’s public transportation looks nicer than here in Taiwan because it’s more recently built. Taiwan really built up their train system back in the 80s-90s and maybe even before. But it’s just as good. They have high-speed trains here that we’ve used. It’s not expensive. Taxis here are not as cheap as in Mainland China, but they’re still a fraction of the cost of taxis in the West. You can’t even go a few kilometers in the United States or France without spending $20, €25 for a taxi ride.
All public transportation in Mainland China is people-owned, while the taxis are private. Best I can tell, it’s all people-owned here except for taxis and buses. They’ve got all these public trains that circle the island. Then private bus companies drive into the mountains especially where we are in Nantou County, they have private bus companies that are very good. The buses are clean and they’re very cheap. So that is a real benefit.
The roads are incredibly well maintained here in Taiwan. Road repair is constant and everywhere, in town and outside. We even seen them asphalting back alleys. Can you imagine that in the United States, which quit maintaining its infrastructure back in the 80s?
France’s infrastructure is getting worse, since they’re spending tens of billions of dollars in Ukraine and on floods of illegal immigrants. It’s behind the United States, maybe 20 or 30 years, but it’s heading in that direction. Before we left France, the national train company SNCF announced that they are not going to build a high-speed train to Cherbourg because the ground underneath that stretch is not good enough for high-speed trains, which is just a load of bunk. They just don’t want to spend the money.
Mainland China, when they create a rail line, when they figure out where they want to put the line, they get all the people who live along that line invested in it. The people along the line actually buy the railroad bonds for their rail line and the train stations that are going to stop in their town. What a great idea.
All the infrastructure in Taiwan and on the Mainland is extensive. It’s world-class in both Taiwan and Mainland China. Again, Taiwan looks older because it created its infrastructure before the recent build-up of Mainland China. But it’s still first class.
I’ll never forget when former California Governor Jerry Brown visited Xi Jinping right after he was elected China’s president in 2013, and of course now, it’s double or triple what it was back then, 10 or 11 years ago.
But Brown was quoted in the local press saying how impressed he was with their high-speed rail system. He said, “We tried to build a high-speed train between San Francisco and Los Angeles, which is a no-brainer, and all we got was 200 lawsuits”. There’s no Not In My Backyard, NIMBY, individuals saying to hell with the people, to hell with making an effort to better society, increase productivity and economic activity by having public transportation. They’re still waiting for them.
Thus, with excellent public transportation and excellent infrastructure everywhere we go, we have freedom of movement, which is getting harder and harder in France and in the United States is almost non-existent.
Number six, another thing that we love here is there’s a tremendous amount of mutual respect, social courtesy and giving others space on the streets, sidewalks, in restaurants, etc. People are not sitting there worried about if they bump into somebody or whatever, if somebody gets in your way, here in China, go ahead. It’s very Confucian, very Daoist and very Buddhist. The Chinese are very indulgent about other people, like in public spaces and parks.
When we were in Shenzhen recently, there was a guy in a park across the street from our hotel, and every morning from 7 to 9, he just belted out song after song after song, and he had an amplified speaker which you could hear for 2-3 blocks around. Nobody complained. There would be lawsuits in the United States, public outrage. No, here it’s live and let live. Que sera sera. In China, they live it, not just sing a refrain from the Sound of Music.
Number seven family and elderly, we just love it here because this is again very Confucist-Daoist-Buddhist. Elders are highly respected and esteemed.
The fact that we are professors makes us even more vaunted in the eyes of the Chinese, both in Taiwan Province and on the Mainland. It’s not just because we’re foreigners. We see it. They’re helping old people, strangers helping strangers, helping old people on the streets, helping them off on and off buses, with bags and stuff. We feel really respected and admired in China on both sides of the Taiwan Straits. It’s really relaxing and comforting to be considered someone special because of our age.
I’ll tell you a story about Evelyne. It was about five years ago, before I knew her. She was having a problem with her equilibrium, which they finally cured.
Not once, but twice at the Saint-Lazare Train Station in Paris, which is one of the busiest, it’s the one that serves Normandy, where we were living. Getting off the crowded train along with hundreds of other passengers, no one offered to help this elderly lady with her bags. On the quay, she was walking towards the turnstiles, she lost her balance and fell down flat on the ground. She was lucky enough to brace herself with her hands. She was dazed and confused about what happened, flat out on her front side, collecting her wits. For 2-3 minutes, here was a 60-something-year-old woman, and everybody was stepping over her, like she was a piece of trash. Healthy, young people were stepping over her, striding over her body, not even bothering to offer to help her up – not once, but two different times. That was five years ago and it’s even worse now. That would be unbelievable, unimaginable in Chinese culture.
On our last trip to Shenzhen, I was talking to a taxi driver from Chengdu, Sichuan. I was explaining to him, why at 70 years of age, I was still working, we need the money, our retirement is not enough, and we have a lot of expenses. Surprised, he asked, well, what about your children? Why aren’t they helping you? I explained to him it’s the opposite way in the West. The parents are supposed to financially support the children.
It was amazing. He was visibly upset when I told him that. He was disgusted. This also happens in Taiwan, when we tell people our children don’t help us if we’re in a bind. They’re shocked and disappointed. They can’t believe it, because they’re helping their parents. This taxi driver in Shenzhen was saying, “I’m down here, I’ve been here for eight years. My wife and three kids are back in Chengdu, with our parents, we’re supporting them and making sure they have a place to live, et cetera”.
This is something that is just 180 degrees different than in the United States and the West in general. I think it was better before, but now with the degradation of Western society it’s just gotten worse and worse and worse.
Then that brings us up to social solidarity. Number eight, it’s just so nice to know that if Evelyne falls down here, people would be rushing to take care of her. I remember we got off a bus here in Puli, where we are now living. This was back in May 2024, when we came here for the first time to see it. We got off the bus and we had our bags. We couldn’t go five meters and two women, two younger women offered to help us with our bags all the way to our hotel. Can you imagine that? I can’t in the West, I simply cannot. It just doesn’t happen anymore.
Everywhere we go, and again, not just because we’re foreigners. You can just see there’s a certain solidarity. There’s an unspoken community among the people, strangers and family alike, which is extremely comforting and reassuring to know that if one of us got sick in public or whatever, or we had an accident or whatever, someone’s going to be there to take care of us and help us. They don’t know who the hell we are, but they’re going to do it anyway because it’s very Confucist-Daoist-Buddhist to do that.
Finally, number nine is driving. We bought a 20-year-old 2004 Honda. It’s enough to get us around town. The island is small enough that we can go visit some places in Taiwan later when we get more settled in. But, the drivers in Taiwan are just unbelievably good. They are the most relaxed drivers I have ever seen in my life.
Taiwan has an advantage here, because in Mainland China they’re doing a lot of lane changing in heavy traffic and they’re more horn-happy than they are here. But in Taiwan, it is just so relaxing to drive here. It’s just so nice.
We have a couple of roundabouts in Puli. To this day, I cannot tell if it’s the vehicles entering or already in it that have the right of way. I asked a driving friend what the rule was and they said they didn’t know either, adding, “The rule is to not run into anybody”! And that’s the way it works. Very Confucist-Daoist-Buddhist.
Motorbikes are everywhere I’ve traveled in Asia. Like the region, Taiwanese motorbike drivers take risks, however, they’re not reckless. They do take a lot of risks, thus, when we’re driving, we do have to be really careful about motor scooters coming up on our right or on our left if we’re turning left. There are a lot more motor scooters here in Taiwan than there are on the Mainland, which is now mostly cars and wall-to-wall public transportation. Nonetheless, Taiwan is nothing like Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. There, it seems like millions of motor scooters, swarms are zooming all over that country. It’s just unbelievable.
Anyway, these are our impressions. We’re loving it here. We’re sleeping better. We’re just so relaxed and it’s so pleasant with the people. We’ve already made good Taiwanese friends. We’ve been accepted in our little neighborhood. People are interested in meeting us, they’re very nice, polite, so what is there not to like? Recall everything that I just listed for you. What is there not to like? Not to mention, Chinese food is outstanding.
This is the second Taiwan report. We’ve got a lot more to cover here. I’m also doing short visual reports called Adventures in Asia with LadyB and Gonggong, and I’ve done 15. I’m transferring them from Facebook because it is censoring me like crazy. Therefore, I’m putting them on my website. As soon as I get the 15 republished on China Rising Radio Sinoland, then I’ll start with number 16 there (http://www.chinarising.puntopress.com/search/?q=ladyb). I’ve already got over 100 that I could report on. It’s just incredibly fascinating over here, so interesting and with much to observe, write and talk about.
Thank you. This is Jeff J. Brown China Rising Radio Sinoland signing out.
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JEFF J. BROWN, Editor, China Rising, and Senior Editor & China Correspondent, Dispatch from Beijing, The Greanville Post
Jeff J. Brown is a geopolitical analyst, journalist, lecturer and the author of The China Trilogy. It consists of 44 Days Backpacking in China – The Middle Kingdom in the 21st Century, with the United States, Europe and the Fate of the World in Its Looking Glass (2013); Punto Press released China Rising – Capitalist Roads, Socialist Destinations (2016); and BIG Red Book on China (2020). As well, he published a textbook, Doctor WriteRead’s Treasure Trove to Great English (2015). Jeff is a Senior Editor & China Correspondent for The Greanville Post, where he keeps a column, Dispatch from Beijing and is a Global Opinion Leader at 21st Century. He also writes a column for The Saker, called the Moscow-Beijing Express. Jeff writes, interviews and podcasts on his own program, China Rising Radio Sinoland, which is also available on YouTube, Stitcher Radio, iTunes, Ivoox and RUvid. Guests have included Ramsey Clark, James Bradley, Moti Nissani, Godfree Roberts, Hiroyuki Hamada, The Saker and many others. [/su_spoiler]
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