Beijing gridlock
Greetings from Beijing! I should have written sooner but we’ve kept up a pretty hectic schedule of visits to assorted tourist attractions. The new bird’s nest Olympic stadium is indeed gorgeous, and Chengde, the Xanadu of Kublai Khan fame, is full of Orientalist wonders, including a 1:2 copy of Dalai Lama’s tempel in Llasa. At […]
taxed
I’m filing my taxes today. I made 1,162,000 New Taiwan dollars last year. That’s equivalent to 38,000 dollars US, 19,262 pounds or 229,000 Swedish krona. That’s about 40% of the salary I made in London. Still we are far, far better off economically in Taiwan than we were in England. In part since Diane is […]
no kids allowed
I got this email from the Swedish Trade Mission in Taipei (the people who would be the Swedish Embassy if there were official diplomatic relations between Sweden and Taiwan): We’d like to invite you to the reception for the Swedish National Day on June 6th. Please send us your reply to taiwan@swedishtrade.se before June 02. […]
Eurovision
The Eurovision Song Contest just took place in Belgrade. Some 45 countries are competing — it’s all about hair, heels, muscles, dresses, and yes, songs. The competition is watched by hundreds of millions of people across Europe, but gay men and pre-teen girls are the only ones who admit to actually loving it. I have […]
Nightmare
I had a nightmare. I dreamed I was sitting talking to two Americans in a bar in Shanghai. I didn’t know them before, but they seemed like typical stupid foreigners in Asia: sent by their companies, big beer bellies, little cute girlfriends, uninterested in the culture, the history and the language … Then suddenly one […]
Out in paperback
Cambridge University Press just confirmed that Identity, Interest & Action, long available only in hard-back and ridiculously priced at some $130 US, now is out in paperback. It took 12 long years! …
how I’m planning to democratize China
With KMT and the new president, Ma Yingjiu, in place, we are all looking forward to more cordial relations between Taiwan and the mainland. One of the exciting opportunities is for more student exchanges. We need mainland students very badly. There are some 350,000 university places in Taiwan but only 200,000 children were born last […]
Obama babies
Hilary Clinton may have a majority of the votes of the over 65’s, but Barrack Obama has a majority of the votes of the under 1’s. If you search for “Obama baby” on YouTube you get 1,120 hits; a search for “Hilary Clinton baby” only gives 447 hits. The verdict is clear: American babies prefer […]
China’s new president?
We have a new president in Taiwan. At 9 this morning Ma Yingjiu was inaugurated. Yes, he spoke a lot about improving relations with the mainland, about agreeing to disagree with Beijing, and about demilitarizing the whole cross-straights issue. And — this is great news — there will be direct flights to the mainland as […]
A philosophy of boredom
There are two kinds of boredom, writes Lars Svendsen in A Philosphy of Boredom. There is the kind of boredom you feel when sitting through a presentation at work which goes on for ever, without pause and without direction. But there is also the more fundamental boredom which comes from the fact that few of […]