Primary Taiwanese news agency Central News Agency (CNA) recently reported that the human rights organization, “Freedom House” just released the 2022 Global Freedom Report. Although global democracy has declined for 16 consecutive years, Taiwan still scored 94 points, second only to Japan in Asia. Freedom House’s 2022 Report issued a warning that global democracy has been on the decline, and that authoritarianism is increasingly likely to replace democracy and become the international standard model of national governance. Globally, Taiwan is tied for 17th place with Iceland, Estonia, Chile and Germany, which also scored 94 points. In Asia, Japan scored 96 points. The Report evaluates 210 countries and regions around the world, and uses the local people’s access to political rights and civil liberties as the evaluation indicators. This year, China maintained its score from last year, with negative 2 points for “political rights” and only 11 points for “civil liberties”, for a total of 9 points, and was once again listed as a “Not Free” country. The report pointed out that in recent years, Beijing’s authoritarian regime has become increasingly oppressive, and the Communist Party has continued to strengthen its control over all aspects of people’s lives, undermining a series of early moderate legal reforms. As for Hong Kong, which China has strongly suppressed, this year it scored 10 points in “political rights” and 33 points in “civil liberties”, a total of 43 points, a sharp drop of 9 points from last year’s 52 points. The Report indicated that today, only two out of ten people in the world live in a free country.

Source: CNA, February 25, 2022
https://www.cna.com.tw/news/firstnews/202202250016.aspx

The “chained woman” case was exposed in January and quickly became the hottest issue among the whole of China. By February 21, case-related articles on the Internet had been read over 6 billion times. This case was about the crime of trafficking women and turning them into sex slaves.

A woman was kidnapped in 1997 and in 1998, she was sold to a village man in Dongji Township, Feng County, Xuzhou City, Jiangsu Province. The family kept her as a sex slave – though they called her the wife of their first son Dong Zhimin. All of the men in the family including Dong Zhimin, his father, and his brother repeatedly raped the woman. The family locked her up, using an iron chain and pulled out almost all her teeth so that she could not bite any of the sex offenders when They were raping her. Dong has eight children (it is not known whether the woman gave birth to all of them).

After the case was exposed, the Chinese authorities, from the county to city to the central government in Beijing, tried to cover it up. They locked the woman up in a mental hospital. The authorities claimed that she was a missing person, Xiao Huamei from Yunan Province. The public, on the other hand, came up with substantial evidence pointing out that she was Li Ying from Sichuan Province. The reasons that the government denied she was Li Ying were, first, that Li Ying’s father served in the army and the authorities did not want soldiers to feel that they can’t even protect their own families; and second, that Li Ying was kidnapped when she was less than 13 years old. That would mean that Dong’s family group raped an underage girl. The authorities also built walls to block people from entering the village and detained and harassed anyone coming to the township in order to “protect” the woman.

The Chinese people exposed the information that these women trafficking and sex slave cases were common throughout China. In many cases, the whole village helped to guard the kidnapped women and chased them back if they tried to escape. The local authorities acquiesced and even supported the practice, including issuing a fake or illegal residence card, a marriage certificate, and a birth certificate. When kidnapped women went to the court to seek a separation, which was very difficult to accomplish, the judges rejected divorce and asked them to go back to the rapist who kept them as slaves.

An article in the state media “China Daily.” published on February 25, 2021, revealed how severe this human trafficking problem is in China. In 2020 alone, there were one million people missing in China, according to the “China’s Missing People Whitepaper (2020).” This was already a “great improvement” from the 3.94 million who were missing in 2016 and 2.6 million in 2017.

Source: China Daily, February 26, 2021
https://tech.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202102/26/WS60386587a3101e7ce9741248.html

Major Taiwanese news source Liberty Times Network (LTN) recently reported that the U.S. think tank The Heritage Foundation released  its 2022 Economic Freedom Index report. A total of 184 countries in the world were included in the evaluation. For the first time, Taiwan won the rank of the sixth in the world and third in the Asia-Pacific region. The Heritage Foundation report noted that this year’s Economic Freedom Index showed that the global economy remained “moderately free” overall, but the average index was 60, down 1.6 points from last year. Singapore remains the most economically free, but the top 10 countries have changed significantly. Following Singapore, the other nine countries in the top ten are Switzerland, Ireland, New Zealand, Luxembourg, Taiwan, Estonia, Netherlands, Finland and Denmark. In authoritarianism, China’s economic freedom is virtually non-existent, and Hong Kong was removed from the index in 2021 due to increasing Chinese influence and interference. Taiwan’s economic freedom score is 80.1, ranking 6th in the 2022 Economic Freedom Index. In the past five years, Taiwan has been one of the few countries in the world with sustained economic growth. Due to the improvement of judicial efficiency and labor freedom, Taiwan scored high overall. The Heritage Foundation report suggests that, if business freedom and financial freedom can be further improved, a higher degree of Taiwan’s economic freedom can be achieved.

Source: LTN, February 15, 2022
https://news.ltn.com.tw/news/world/breakingnews/3829893