On Wednesday, Tunghai University student Cheng Chieh (Zheng Jie), 21, got on a subway from downtown Taipei and began indiscriminately stabbing people. Four were dead and 24 injured when the horrific attack ended, a portion of which was captured on video, above.

The video was flagged by the blog My New Life in Asia, which adds:

Upon his capture, Zheng kept repeating: “Since I was a child I’ve been wanting to do something big!” (我從小立志要做一件大事!) (note). According to preliminary investigations, the man was not drunk. When asked by the police whether he knew that he would be punished, he replied: “I know I will be sentenced to death” (note).

SCMP reports that Cheng told police the attack felt “nice.”

“[Cheng] also told us he chose to commit the crime from Lungshan Temple station to Jiangzicui station because he knew the ride – the longest between stops – would give him more time to kill,” said an investigator with the New Taipei City police department.

That’s Online has several graphic pictures of the attack’s aftermath.

HBO’s Game of Thrones arrived in China last week, but the fit-for-CCTV broadcast was so rigorously edited to conform to some “public morality” that one netizen hilariously called it “a medieval European castle documentary.” But amid all the articles about this development, we may have lost sight of a more amazing fact: Game of Thrones – a show about political wrangling, skulduggery, sabotage, dissolution, sex, etc. — was allowed to air on Chinese TV. It took two whole days before we got this Ishaan Tharoor post on the Washington Post, titled:

Why ‘Game of Thrones’ is actually dangerous for China’s rulers

Obvious, right?

Indeed, if China’s censors watched more closely, they could find other reasons to keep on cutting.

Go on…

In “Game of Thrones,” the centralized state — the united Seven Kingdoms of Westeros — is an entity balanced on a thread, forever vulnerable to the whims of the power-brokers of the land. The TV show compels you to root for separatists — the charismatic, stoic Starks of the North — who are trying to split away from the tyranny of the capital. Moreover, the show reinforces over and over in the viewer’s mind just how unnatural and manufactured the centralized authority of a high king is.

Tharoor draws other parallels between Westeros and — I’ll just say it, though a reasonable reader will understand that much of the piece is tongue-in-cheek — China. For example, the Wall that the Night’s Watch defends may well be the Great Wall, etc. But then we eventually get to this rather amazing comparison…

The most storied noble house in “Game of Thrones” is that of the Targaryens, the silver-haired, dragon-riding family that begins the show in exile across the sea. We learn that the Targaryens once ruled all of Westeros until a rebellion, punctuated by a few hideous slaughters, chased them to a small, craggy isle off the coast called Dragonstone. Not long after the last of the Targaryens flee the island for more distant hideaways, the rock becomes the fortress of Stannis Baratheon, another lord who thinks himself the true ruler of Westeros. Dragonstone exists in the series as a permanent reminder of dissent, brooding sullenly off the shores of the realm.

It doesn’t take a tremendous imaginative leap to see a parallel to China. In 1949, Mao Zedong’s Communists defeated the nationalist forces, the remnants of which fled en masse to the island of Taiwan.

Holy crap! Dragonstone is Taiwan? If a Chinese paper ever picked this up…

That’s today’s Taipei Times. Here are the first two paragraphs:

The blockbuster fantasy TV drama Game of Thrones with all of its violence and sex, may be based in part on Taiwan and the nation’s political and military struggles with China.

According to the Washington Post, the fictional island of Dragonstone — a centerpiece in the story — may in fact be a metaphor for Taiwan. The TV series created for HBO is sometimes drawn from “real historical events, and suffused with real lessons for nations and governments,” the Post said, and it does not take a tremendous leap of imagination to see a parallel with Taiwan and China.

Chinese censors may not read the Washington Post, but the Taipei Times? I think it’s time we ask:

Now the question is whether Taipei Times interpretation of @ishaantharoor WP essay will get GoT banned in China.

— Edward Wong (@comradewong) May 7, 2014

Game of Thrones is likely doomed, just like [insert character of choice]. How many in-show kings will die before the show gets the ax?

Although whatever happens, China’s rip-offs of it — GoT is the most pirated show of all time, after all — will surely continue:

An AH-64E Apache helicopter appears to have tried to land on the side of a residential building on Zhongzheng Road in Longtan, Taoyuan, Taiwan around 10 am this morning. Helicopters should not try to land on the side of buildings. The two pilots — one of whom was reportedly a student — were sent to the hospital.

The helicopter, identified as No. 808, was making a routine training run when it crashed due to a suspected “mechanical malfunction,” though the Taiwanese military is still investigating.

Here’s the AH-64E Apache during better days:

(H/T Mike Yeo)

Do not mess with the Taiwanese Special Forces. They will suck the soul out of you and beat it to a pulp. With their eyes. In your nightmares.

The above is via Rocket News 24, which calls these guys a “Special Force clone army.”

Other than the obvious added protection and intimidation factor of the masks, there is one other possible explanation for the Taiwanese government issuing them: they don’t want us to realize that they’ve actually just introduced a horrifying army of supersoldier Boba Fett clones.

Another look:

We’re all for a good martial outfit, but can we offer an alternative design? One that conveys conflict resolution instead of death to your mother and your extended family?

(H/T Alicia)

Taiwan’s basketball team has done it again. For the second time in two months, it erased a double-digit second half deficit en route to an upset of China.

The latest win happened, incredibly, in Tianjin, essentially a home game for China. With the 82-79 victory on Monday, Taiwan (Chinese Taipei, as they’re officially called) takes home gold at the East Asian Games.

The China Post has this story:

Point guard Ke Chi-hao gave Taiwan a two-point lead on a three-pointer with 25.7 seconds left, and after China’s Zhai Xiaochuan failed to convert a three-pointer of his own as time wound down, Tseng Wen-ting converted one of two free throws to seal the victory.

…Taiwan earned the gold after China dominated most of the game. It led 40-33 at halftime and was ahead by as many as 13 in the third quarter, before Taiwan fought back.

Taiwan’s previous victory over its “big brother” came in the quarterfinals of the FIBA Asia Championship in August, when it turned a 10-point halftime deficit into an 18-point blowout. We said at the time that the loss was “humbling” for Team China.

We’re not quite sure what to call this latest setback. Discouraging, possibly. Or… expected? The lean years of Chinese basketball have officially begun, during which it’ll need to overhaul a roster of aging national team veterans who barely look the part of rec league competitors (Wang Zhizhi, sorry — thinking of you).

Chinese Taipei, meanwhile, is a young, fun, and exciting team, having just secured its first East Asian Games basketball championship since 2005 (it also won in 1997). Next time they prevail over their rivals from the mainland, a team they had never beaten in a major international competition before this summer, perhaps no one will be very surprised.

Image via NetEase

Florentijn Hofman’s rubber duck is the goldmine that will never be depleted. Deflated, maybe, but never depleted. This we know because his rubber duck arrived in Kaohsiung, Taiwan on Thursday ahead of Typhoon Usagi — that storm that’s killed 33 people in southern China and southeast Asia so far, i.e. around where Taiwan is located — and attracted half a million spectators.

Cower before your new overlord.

Kaohsiung residents pulled out all the stops for the duck’s arrival, including young dancers dressed as ducks. “It keeps on smiling to you, you know. It says, ‘don’t you worry, laugh, be happy!’” said Hofman, who was on site.

“This big rubber duck in your harbor, in Kaohsiung in this case, changes Kaohsiung.”

It changes Kaohsiung.

“And it changes also your fantasy and your brain.”

It’s like LSD!

“And it’s a piece of art.”

G’damn right!

The duck is slated for a multi-city tour around Taiwan. It’ll leave Kaohsiung on October 20, but not before it’s expected to lure 3 million visitors and rake in $30 million, according to CNN.

And look: the duck is only getting stronger.

“The rubber duck usually takes more than an hour to be inflated,” said Lai [Zeno Lai, director general of the Kaohsiung Government Information Bureau and the event's spokesperson]. “But in Kaohsiung, it only takes seven minutes.”

The team has promised to pass on its new techniques and any lessons learned to other Taiwanese cities set to receive the duck.

The duck is 18 meters (60 feet), according to an official website, which is half a meter larger than the original that captivated Hong Kongers. Not sure how that compares to Beijing’s version, but…

Wait. How can the Rubber Duck be in multiple places at the same time? Taiwan and Beijing?

You mean to tell me it’s just a mass-produced curio that plays off our weakness for kitsch while unapologetically blurring the line between pop art and naked commercialism?

Is that it?

Waiting…

Waiting…

Waiting…

Hello?

(Images via Seattle PI)

On Saturday, more than 30,000 100,000 people marched in Taipei, as citizens remain furious over the suspicious circumstances surrounding the death of 24-year-old conscript Hung Chung-chiu on July 4.

And then they gathered on a square and sang Les Miserables.

As the Wall Street Journal reports:

Mr. Hung died after being ordered to perform excessive physical activity as punishment for what his family said was an attempt by his superiors to prevent the corporal from going public on allegedly questionable behavior in his unit. Another massive demonstration is set for next weekend.

Mr. Hung died 72 hours before his scheduled discharge. He had planned to resume his graduate study at National Chengkung University upon completion of his military obligation, his family said.

Suspicion surrounding Hung’s treatment before his death stirred up anger against the government, but it was the MND’s subsequent inability to provide answers, such as disclosing missing footage of a surveillance camera where Mr. Hung was ordered to perform strenuous exercise before losing consciousness, that really infuriated the public.

(Update, 5:55 pm: Via AFP: “Organisers claimed 200,000 people joined the protest, while the government’s estimate of the crowd size was 100,000.” On July 20, in a separate protest for Hung Chung-chiu, “about 30,000 people demonstrated outside the defence ministry in the capital… according to Citizen 1985, an activist group that organised the protest.” )

As the protest went on into the night, thousands of people broke into song. Above (via Youku), the people sing a Chinese version of “Do You Hear the People Sing?” from Les Mis.

CCTV has another version of the video posted on its official YouTube page.

We’ve said this before, but eventually someone will write Les Mis: Beijing, and it’s going to be heartbreaking and mesmerizing and great. We don’t mean a Peking Opera version, either.

A preview.

POSTSCRIPT: You can watch the entirety of the 25th anniversary Les Miserables performance from the London O2 Arena on Youku. It’s amazing, up to Alfie Boe’s rendition of Bring Him Home (105:55 mark, below) and through it, until the every end. You should do this sometime:

Politics in action, folks.

We like this guy:

He knows when his shitty day isn’t just any other shitty, boring day. And you can bet he’s seen this before.

So what happened? Daily Mail, take it away:

Taiwanese lawmakers exchanged punches and threw water at each other today ahead of an expected vote that would authorise a referendum on whether to finish a fourth nuclear power plant on the densely populated island of 23 million people.

Nuclear power has long been a contentious issue in Taiwan and became more so following the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan in 2011.

While many Taiwanese consider nuclear power generation an unacceptable safety risk for the earthquake-prone island, economic analyses suggest disruptive power shortages are inevitable if the fourth plant is not completed.

It's crackin in Taiwan, but I'm gettin a massage and this lady put this Hot ass oil on my back sooo I'm about to fart..#GetBack

— Kevin Durant (@KDTrey5) July 16, 2013

@KDTrey5 via Deadspin

The talk of the day has been Mark Griffith and Andrew Dougherty’s brilliant music video Beijing State of Mind, a tribute to this city of ours, set to the beat of Jay-Z’s famous homage to New York. The Brooklyn native’s Empire State of Mind has, of course, inspired countless spin-offs, about Chinese cities other than Beijing, too.

In fact, there was one just last week by the folks at NMA TV, which we encountered over the weekend (had it all set to go for tonight’s links edition, actually). It’s not bad, but, um — how do I put this nicely? — it’s about Taiwan. No offense to those of you who prefer Taipei over Beijing, but obviously we don’t. The video is embedded below, and here’s the webpage on which you’ll find lyrics.

Another Empire State of Mind parody, also pretty good, is about FC Guo’an, our hometown soccer team. (Dougherty sort of dissed them in his version: “Catch me wid my boys at Gongti at a Guo’an game // I made the Guo’an shirt more famous than the Guo’an can.”) This one was written by local rapper Nasty Ray, who performs in Chinese. Wild East Football has the story for you (with a hat tip to the commenter on the Griffith/Dougherty post). Youku video here.

And finally, here’s “Beijing State of Mind” by Iron Mike and Up, with footage from 2011. It has nothing to do with Jay-Z’s Empire State of Mind, actually. The song used is Ray Charles’s “Mess Around.” Youku video here.

ROLLING UPDATES: There are, obviously, more Empire State of Mind parodies out there, and if you know of any, send em along, or leave a comment like kgincq did. Here’s a song about that “mountain city where dreams are made of” (“there’s nothing you can’t see…”), Chongqing:

(More info about the song here. And here’s a live performance.)

Here’s Hong Kong State of Mind, aka SAR State of Mind (pick one and stick with it, fellas), with credits to Soo Jin Koh, Shao Ong, Simon Li, Charity Battad, and Brandon Koh.

The world has a nameless new panda cub! Let the excitement of that pronouncement slowly settle in.

So. What’s the big deal about this one?

As WSJ’s China Realtime Report explains, “Unlike virtually every other panda born outside the People’s Republic of China in recent years, it will stay at the zoo where it was born.”

The zoo being in Taipei, capital of Taiwan, which, as you may know, has a special relationship with China.

The female cub, born at 8:05 pm on July 6, is the product of Tuan Tuan and Yuan Yuan (tuanyuan means “reunion”). (The mother is Yuan Yuan, 9, who was artificially inseminated in March.) The parents were a gift from the PRC in 2008, only accepted by Taiwan’s Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) after the Democratic Progressive Party rejected a similar offer in 2005.

Below are more pictures of the cub. Yuan Yuan “punctured” the tiny infant’s leg, by the way, so now the cub is in an incubator, but is expected to fully recover.

POSTSCRIPT: Pandas mating:

Panda mating making news across #hongkong pic.twitter.com/GuI0k1eW7N

— JournoDannyAsia (@JournoDannyAsia) July 9, 2013

Also see: Panda’s O-face.

It could be that I have absolutely no understanding of Taiwan politics, but holy catfight! “Members of the ruling party and opposition party fought for control over the rostrum, ahead of a scheduled discussion on the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant referendum,” Taiwan-based The China Post explained.

Taiwan’s legislature is notorious for its brawls between legislators – i.e. elected adults who are supposed to be the representatives of a democratic, civil society — but this recent fight brings politics to a new level: pinching, shrieking, hair-grabbing, pushing, crying. And whatever is happening here:

Coffee was used as a projectile as well, which you can watch in the above video. China Post again:

At 6:40 a.m., female lawmakers of the Kuomintang (KMT) gathered in front of the Assembly Hall’s entrance and were able to enter and take hold of the rostrum ahead of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) members.

Opposition legislators reportedly began attacking KMT lawmakers in an attempt to gain control of the rostrum, giving rise to an all-out brawl.

What was this dispute over, anyway? Taxes, of course. As the Telegraph explains:

The tax, which the government said at the time was part of their efforts to ensure “social justice”, was approved by the ruling Kuomintang controlled parliament in July last year and took effect in January.

But since then the new tax has sparked waves of opposition from influential business groups and big stock traders.

Amid mounting calls to scrap the tax to boost falling trading volumes, the Kuomintang government decided to revise the tax, but the attempt encountered strong objections from the three opposition parties.

Meanwhile, legislators in Beijing cackle in delight.

Check out this young couple on the Taipei subway: he reads a book while she, um, sleeps on his lap… with a jacket over her head… bobbing up and down.

Yeah.

Sneaky, naughty, and bookish. Kids these days.

(Via Gawker via Reddit, h/t Nick Papa)

There’s not much info about this video, posted on YouTube by ThePiXNet yesterday and flagged by Reddit, but the description claims the young man is a study abroad student who doesn’t want to return to Taiwan to finish his compulsory military service. Can you blame him? Conscription has been called “prison for the innocent,” and since we’re talking about China here, let’s go ahead and make the comparison with Mao’s Down to the Countryside Movement. Discuss.

The young man, collapsed at the top of an escalator, says in perfect English:

“I’m not going back to the base. I am not going back.”

His father screams at him in broken English, saying he’s going to jail.

“I’d rather go to jail! They’re going to kill me there! There’s going to kill me there!”

The father explains to someone nearby, in Chinese, that the young man doesn’t know how to speak Chinese and that he’s scared.

“No one helped me,” the young man continues. “I went to the military police, they wouldn’t do anything. They won’t do anything at all! Help me, I’m an American!”

The American Institute in Taiwan website states (emphasis theirs): “Men between the ages of 18 and 36 who were born in Taiwan or who have ever held a Taiwan passport should be aware that they may be subject to compulsory military service in Taiwan, even if they are also U.S. citizens, and even if they have entered Taiwan on U.S. passports… The United States Government cannot protect dual nationals from compulsory military service.”

It seems like the boy’s father is unwilling to protect him, either.

There is one way to get out of compulsory military service, though: immigrate to mainland China.

From Wikipedia, for those interested in further reading: “Draftees may also request alternative service, usually in community service areas, although the required service period would be longer than military service. Qualified draftees with graduate degrees in the sciences or engineering who pass officer candidate exams may also apply to fulfil their obligations in a national defense service option which involves three months of military training, followed by an officer commission in the reserves and four years working in technical jobs in the defense industry or government research institutions.”

In this video, a woman in Taipei’s Songshan subway station — whether distracted by a phone call, drunk, or what – walks off the edge of the platform and appears to make a hand landing on the track. A man from the opposite side sees this and quickly goes in for the rescue, with the help of attendants and other passengers.

Russia Today writes in the video description: “The woman suffered a bone fracture on her right hand and had four ribs broken on her right side, with a fracture on her left knee.”

China’s streak of people helping those who fall onto subway tracks continues.