Kerim's Triptych ❧ Pariah State, AWOL, Moment Magnitude

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1️⃣ Pariah State

During COVID, Taiwan coined the slogan "Taiwan Can Help" to protest its exclusion from the WHO, and to advertise its own ability to be a “force for good in the international community.” Recently, however, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) threatened to undermine any goodwill generated by this campaign when it openly announced plans to support a settler hospital in the occupied West Bank.

I used this occasion to meditate on the fact that, even though Taiwan has undergone a similar process of transitional justice to that of South Africa, Taiwan failed to use this occasion to reflect upon its foreign policy.

During the Cold War, Taiwan was paired with the apartheid states of Israel and South Africa as a trio of “pariah states.” South Africa and Taiwan have since shed their authoritarian pasts, emerging as liberal democracies. They have also each undertaken a process of transitional justice in order to reckon with these histories. But while South Africa has extended that reckoning to the international arena, accusing Israel of apartheid and leading the charge against Israel’s genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), Taiwan has limited its own version of transitional justice to domestic politics.

As a result, Taiwan’s Cold War legacy still haunts its international relations, leaving it unable or unwilling to speak out against the genocide in Gaza, even as it offers support to Ukraine against Russia. As an American Jew who is also a Taiwanese citizen, I have repeatedly tried to speak out against this silence. I would like for my fellow Taiwanese to be confident enough in their place on the world stage, in the vibrancy of their culture, and in their democracy that they could find the voice to support the Palestinian cause. Instead, I find Taiwan seemingly willing to break international law in order to provide direct support to the occupation.

Why this disconnect between Taiwan’s stated values and its behavior in the Middle East?

Read my article over at Positions Politics to see how I answer this question.

2️⃣ AWOL

As in the United States, Taiwanese construction companies and farms rely heavily on undocumented migrant labor. There are about 90,000 undocumented workers in Taiwan, which may not seem like a lot, but it is about eleven percent of the total migrant labor workforce, and their situation is just as precarious.

Groups of undocumented migrant laborers often “go where the crops are”—working in northern Taiwan during the summer and moving south for the winter. To avoid detection, they live in makeshift shelters, sleeping on thin mattresses and using cardboard boxes as tables and chairs.

As explained in a recent report by Kwangyin Liu for Commonwealth Magazine, many workers are driven to go AWOL from the official factory contract system in order to pay off loans and escape from burdensome brokerage fees. Taiwanese farmers also struggle to find workers; thus, "Farmers and migrant workers alike are trapped in a dysfunctional system."

3️⃣ Moment Magnitude

Although, living in Taiwan, I thought that I knew everything there was to know about earthquakes, I recently learned two new things, thanks to my friend Roy. First off, I learned that the "Richter scale" was replaced by the "moment magnitude scale," even if many organizations still use the older name. Secondly, and much more interesting, I learned that these are logarithmic scales. A 5.0 earthquake is ten times as powerful as a 4.0, which is ten times as powerful as a 3.0 earthquake. This video, by Randall Munroe of XKCD, does a good job of illustrating how it works. Turns out there can be negative magnitudes as well.

Endnote

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