Comments on IslaFormosa: Foreign Devils Get Unequal Treatment

You are all racists.I have never come across any d...

2008-11-16T18:10:00.000+08:00

You are all racists.
I have never come across any discrimination in Taiwan.
It doesn't exist.

That is just the other side of the coin. Same in H...

2007-06-14T08:56:00.000+08:00

That is just the other side of the coin. Same in HK. Discrimination is rampant, it just happens to be positive most of the time towards "yang guizi". Among HKers the term gwailo 鬼佬 is totally normal when talking about foreigners, though. Which shows me there is at least a total lack of sensitivity towards discrimination issues. Well, you have to live with that one way or another. Being a foreigner in other places is likely to be much more difficult.

On average, 10,000 Taiwanese become naturalized ci...

2007-06-14T01:26:00.000+08:00

On average, 10,000 Taiwanese become naturalized citizens in the US every year. Up until last year, 11 Americans had become naturalized Taiwanese. One of the reasons for this is that Taiwan is not nearly as accommodating as you make it out to be.

You should look at how ethnocentric (a view of the world where a culture puts its own group at the center, with all others scaled and related to that group) Taiwanese can be when you bring up such terms as 老外. I think it explains why Taiwanese people have a hard time referring to us by our nationalities (American, Canadian, German, Swiss, etc.) and why they find it easy to lump us all together as 老外 or 外國人.

in other news, the titanic sinks

2007-06-11T12:58:00.000+08:00

in other news, the titanic sinks

I can't report that this has diminished in HK, alt...

2007-06-11T11:48:00.000+08:00

I can't report that this has diminished in HK, although I dunno how it was pre 1997. I often enough get the VIP treatment here.
I also doubt the average person will consider Taiwans politcial situation, when communicating with a foreigner.
Since the same thing is going on in two distinct Chinese communities, it seems more likely that there is another particular phenomenon going on. Can't simply be colonial past or international isolation.
The preferential treatment is exclusively extended to Western looking Western foreigners in Hong Kong. I often heard very opposite experiences from people who happen to be of other foreign descent (if only be outer appearence) or come from Mainland China.

Given Taiwan's worsening global political situatio...

2007-06-11T06:30:00.000+08:00

Given Taiwan's worsening global political situation, I think they need all the pro-Taiwan foreigners they can get.

Hear! hear!Perhaps when the locals are used to see...

2007-06-10T23:31:00.000+08:00

Hear! hear!
Perhaps when the locals are used to seeing foriegners, all the treatments will diminish. Like in Hong Kong now. But this will take a long time.