Scattered Thoughts -Mostly About Asia, May 24, 2024
Taiwanese Drag Queens visit the President, Filipino fake casino love scam human trafficking call center mysterious mayor story, Chinese real estate risk, Ninja Burglar in Missouri, and a bird video
Greetings,
Another weekly news round up of mostly Asian related news and events from (mostly) Asia this week. -And, yes, there is Ninja News!!
But first video of some birds in upstate New York swimming and bathing in a parking lot pot hole.
Last Saturday I found myself sitting in the driver’s seat of an ambulance in upstate New York parked in a parking lot being told to stand by and wait for calls. The voice you can hear is my partner of the day, a very caring EMT who, interestingly, is also the leader of an all girl “boy scout” troop. (FYI, “the Boy Scouts of America” now call themselves “Scouting USA” and admit girls. However, in a surprising number of cases, the individual troops are segregated. I asked why Scouting USA and not The Girl Scouts and the answer was that the girls in her group wanted to learn first aid and wilderness camping skills, things more traditionally associated with the “Boy Scouts,” at least where she lives.)
Drag Queens Visit the President of Taiwan
Which brings us to this recent event in Taiwan.
Taiwanese drag queen Nymphia Wind and President Tsai Ing-wen speak during their meeting at the presidential office in Taipei, Taiwan.
"This is probably the first presidential office in the world to host a drag show," Nymphia told Tsai after her performance, streamed live on the office's YouTube, and thanking her for ensuring same-sex marriage came to pass. "Thank you for your contributions to this country, so that I could grow up to be like this today," she added, tearing up. "Thank you for your eight years of dedication, becoming our Taiwan mother."
My Commentary
Personally, I have no desire to see a Drag Queen show, but, then again, I am not the President of Taiwan either. To each his own, or her own, or whatever.
Taiwan was my home for four years, non-sequential years, but I still consider it my second home. It’s an interesting place, I regularly miss living there, but for several reasons it makes more sense for me to stay in the USA.
The issue of whether or not non-Western cultures should embrace Western values is a complex one. While on one hand, there are many quick to say that we have no right to impose or encourage other peoples to accept our values or norms of behavior, these same people often do a fast 180 degree turn around when they see cultures with different norms and ideas about what is acceptable in the areas of domestic violence or cruelty to animals. When this happens one often sees a quick, knee jerk demand to “make these people act civilized.” And, honestly, I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. Sometimes you have to stand for something or you stand for nothing. The ethics of intercultural interactions are not a simple thing.
Which brings me to the issue of Gay Rights in Taiwan. Back in the 1980s, if one asked, as near as I, a straight guy who knew almost nothing about gay life at the time, could tell, there were no gay people in Taiwan. If you asked people in Taiwan, they would usually tell you there were no gay people in Taiwan. When It became obvious to everyone in my then Taiwanese girlfriend’s family that her sister was in a Lesbian relationship, the response by the family was, naturally, “don’t tell anyone.” After all this would be embarrassing as there were no gay people in Taiwan.
But today, Taiwan, in all seriousness, is a leader in the area of Asian gay rights with legal same sex marriage, Pride Parades, and much more.
(For what it’s worth, in the early 1990s, I once read that Taiwan had a higher per capita rate of female to male sex change operations than any other place on Earth. Alas, I cannot cite a source for this anymore. If one finds a source, please feel free to share it in the comments section. )
Switching topics . . .
A Case of Organized Crime in the 21st Century
— Organized Crime Forces Human Trafficking Victims to Commit Internet Romance Scams in Island Call Center forcing questions about whether the lady mayor is a Chinese spy or just a “love child”
Here’s an interesting but complicated news story, but first a semi-philosophical, semi-intellectual mini rant about the nature of humanity.
Humans are fascinating creatures. They have such innate capacity for goodness and generosity, doing things like regularly running in and out of burning buildings to save strangers, organizing to aid others in need, and returning found valuables to the lost and found. And, yet, there’s another side to humans where members of our species regularly dehumanize large swathes of “others” and then perform acts of genocide or use them in horrible, humiliating exploitative ways for fun and personal profit. 1
This is normal human behavior, yet despite it being a regular part of the human condition and experience, somehow it always shocks and surprises us, even though it happens again and again being a regular component of the cycle of history. But the fact that we are still shocked by such repeating and commonplace things as man’s inhumanity to man, well, it does provide hope for the future of the human species to someday learn to stop these nasty things it does. Heavy sigh.
Perhaps some day, I will try to share my thoughts on how this all ties in with culture and culturally approved norms of behavior, but for the moment, I’ll just let it rest here, and begin discussing the issue of hidden scam phone centers that use forced, trapped, human trafficked labor. Many of these are surprisingly large and located in isolated places where law is absent and are owned, run, and operated by Chinese crime networks. The criminals who run these lure and trick potential call center workers to take jobs in areas where laws are either non-existent or not properly enforced, then hold the workers against their will, making them do things they don’t want to do, keeping them brutalized, terrorized, and humiliated into submission, and then forcing them to spend long hours on the internet tricking strangers out of their savings using various scams.
Many of these are located in Burma (Myanmar), a nation that has always been marked by lawlessness and lack of governmental control particularly in the ethnic separatist regions nears its borders. For details go so https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-66655047 or https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw076g5wnr3o
This story, however, focuses on a scam call center located on an island in the Philippines where it was disguised as an online casino. At this call center, 383 Filipinos, 202 Chinese and 73 other foreign nationals were put to work, according to police records, often or in all cases against their will, tricking lonely people online into believing they were in a romantic relationship and then scamming them out of their money one way or another, either asking for gifts, inventing fake emergencies and false cries for aid, or offering false investment opportunities. See: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-68562643
Which is one of those things that is both disturbing and common place. But from there, it gets weirder.
People soon began to look more closely at the local mayor, Alice Guo. Authorities wondered if she should have known, or did know but did not acknowledge or reveal, that the local online offshore casino in her town of Bamban was actually a front for a scam center that utilized forced human trafficking victims as call center representatives. This needs to be asked as the scam center was built partially on land she once owned.
It is a valid question, and it is still awaiting a solid answer one way or the other.
And it gets weirder. Although the mayor claims to have grown up in the area, no one remembers her ever being there, and there are no records of her enrollment in the local educational system, and no one can find her family.
But it’s okay. She can explain this. “I’m a love child. Not a Chinese spy,” she explains. She was born illegitimate, she says, of a Filipina mother who abandoned her at birth to her Chinese father, who raised her in isolation, hiding his illegitimate daughter. "I had no friends. I had no playmates. I grew up hidden in our farm," she said.
According to the BBC:
“The Pogo that served as cover for the gangs in Bamban was built on land partially owned by Ms Guo, but she said she had sold her stake before she was elected in 2022. Authorities raided the facility last March and rescued close to 700 workers, including 202 Chinese nationals and 73 other foreigners who were forced to pose as online lovers. The eight-hectare compound was like a small city, complete with a grocery, warehouse, swimming pool, and even a wine cellar. The scam centre workers toiled on rows and rows of long white tables with computers.”
For more see: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cv22xjw7d9po
(Note, I chose to use exclusively BBC news links because it’s generally a good news source and I did wish to provide a sort of uniformity or common feel to the four links. These stories and events are widely reported in several news sources.)
And for more non-details on the life of Mayor Alice Guo you could try:
https://biolog.com.ng/mayor-alice-guo-biography/
Switching topics . . .
CHINESE REAL ESTATE ISSUES
– A SURPRISINGLY IMPORTANT TOPIC
"Some people have enquired about the campaign, but so far we haven't had any successful transactions," said Qin Yi, a property agent in Shanghai. "The biggest problem is selling the second-hand properties."
MY COMMENTARY
The real estate market in China is showing serious problems, and while this may sound like a minor issue, to someone with a background in understanding China it is an ominous thing.
As people know, China is a state with a Communist government run by a Communist party but which has many Capitalist elements in its society and economy. Which leads to a lot of sophomoric banter on whether China is actually a Communist nation or not, when the truth is simply that the matter is both complex and definitional. China is what it is, and if one insists that it is either completely Capitalist or completely Communist, you are fooling yourself and imposing an interpretation of conditions on the reality around you, a dangerous thing to do.
Which begs the question of what are some of the hidden, important implications of this mixed economy? One is that while there are many Chinese millionaires in China, these millionaires lack the same range of investment, banking, and storage of financial capital opportunities for their new wealth as one would in the USA or another developed nation with a predominantly Capitalist economy. (Personally, I consider the US economy more of a mixed economy than a Capitalist one, and I say that with no judgement.)
Therefore, Chinese millionaires and the ultrawealthy in China tend to buy a lot of real estate for no reason except that compared to the alternatives, real estate tends to be a good investment and a good place to put one’s money. For this reason, the demand for real estate for purchase outpassed the demand for real estate for living a while back and a lot of the real estate in China is empty, having been purchased strictly as an investment item, a collectible, and so long as other people are willing and eager to buy this real estate, that’s not a bad thing for the wealthy who own it, although it does suck for the people who are looking to buy a place to live. However, if the market for this real estate goes down or collapses, and its value collapses, then a lot of the rich and powerful in China are going to lose a lot of money and the economic, societal, and political implications and fall out can only be guessed at.
NINJA!!!
https://www.koamnewsnow.com/news/gusanos-pizzeria-shares-amusing-footage-of-ninja-burglar-break-in/article_7e1ae148-12fd-11ef-953f-0f5234015808.html
Meanwhile in the great state of Missouri in the USA . . . Ninja strike!
"We went back to look at the security camera to see what happened and to gather information for the police department. We found someone crawling through the building, rolling around. It looked like something off 'Mission Impossible.'"
“One of the things that's funny is, we had a safe in our office that stopped operating and was just sitting there. He spent 45 minutes breaking into the safe just to find it was empty,” Hunter said.
"Our team had a little fun with adding some music and putting together an edit of this guy rolling around, trying to dodge or avoid cameras or sensors or something."
"We’re in good shape, and we can all just kind of laugh at this. Hopefully, they catch the guy. If you are in a parkour class and see anybody with those same moves, notify the Duquesne Police Department."
And here is the video
My Comment is “No Comment!”
Consider reading Rory Miller’s excellent book, “Meditations on Violence” if you wish to have a better understanding of man’s inhumanity to man.
In the meantime, if all goes well, Ishl Allah, I will return here next week with another collection of stories and Sunday night with a focused piece on a subjet that interests me. Again, most likely Asian history.