When “Proportionality” Is Not Abstract: A Public Exchange About Taiwan, Law, and the Life I Lost
Public exchange + personal record (rendered in English for clarity)
Documentation hub: rosscline.com/scam
Overview
This post is about a public exchange that unfolded after I left a blunt warning under a discussion about doing business in Taiwan. The exchange mattered because it exposed something deeper than disagreement over one case: it showed how quickly many people rush to defend the state, the legal label, or the surrounding culture, even when the human consequences are glaring.
I do not believe I lost that debate. The other commenter tried to reduce everything to a narrow legal category: a Personal Data Protection Act issue, perhaps with a proportionality concern, but nothing more. My point was and remains that when a legal outcome destroys a person’s home, work, stability, and future after fifteen years of life in Taiwan, it is no longer just an abstract legal footnote.
There is also an international human-rights dimension that people too often pretend is irrelevant. Canada ratified the ICCPR. Taiwan, while not a UN member state in the ordinary treaty framework, formally incorporated the ICCPR into its domestic legal order and publicly presents itself as aligned with those standards. That matters. When a long-term resident can lose his home, livelihood, and entire future in Taiwan through a grossly disproportionate outcome and then be met with bureaucratic deflection from Canada, the public has every right to question whether those rights commitments mean anything in practice.
The broader issue is not simply one judgment. It is the pattern of unequal vulnerability many foreigners quietly learn to live with: selective disbelief, cultural deference, institutional indifference, and the expectation that outsiders should accept consequences locals would often never face in the same way. That is the frame in which this exchange should be read.
Main point: this is not merely a debate about law. It is about what happens when governments speak the language of rights and fairness, yet a plainly disproportionate outcome can still destroy a person’s life while institutions on both sides retreat into labels, distance, and deflection.
The Exchange, Laid Out Clearly
Below is the public exchange rendered in clean English so readers can follow it without having to decode screenshots or jump back and forth between languages. The substance is preserved, while a few partially obscured lines have been translated into readable English as faithfully as possible.
On the first day of starting a business, the scariest thing is not customers, but three kinds of “partners” or “vendors.” Before you even go looking for them, they are already lined up outside your company waiting for you.
I was forcibly driven out of my home. If you are planning to come to Taiwan to build your life and career, you are a fool. See iLearn.tw/newsbrief.
Looking at your case, I do not see what it has to do with whether foreigners come to Taiwan to invest. You were not sentenced because you were a foreigner. You were sentenced because you violated the Personal Data Protection Act. Even if a Taiwanese person had done the same thing, they would also have been sentenced.
Asking Canada for help also does not prove this was a problem with Taiwan’s legal system. If we go to Canada or the United States, we also have to obey local law, do we not?
It is not because you are a foreigner that Taiwan is being unfriendly to foreigners. In fact, compared with how locals are often treated, Taiwan can sometimes be more lenient toward foreigners in order to avoid disputes.
I agree there is a proportionality issue worth discussing, but that has nothing to do with being foreign or with coming to Taiwan to invest.
Would Canada allow someone to publish another person’s private information online without it being illegal?
I understand your point, but I think you are defining “investment” too narrowly.
What I mean is not just financial investment, but the investment of one’s life, career, home, time, and trust in a place. For foreigners, those are often the most real forms of investment.
So when someone who has spent fifteen years building a life and career in Taiwan can have everything they built destroyed by a case that plainly raises proportionality concerns and in which the official account has shown inconsistencies, then this is obviously not just an abstract Personal Data Protection Act issue. It also obviously relates to whether foreigners will feel safe coming to Taiwan to build a future.
The point has never been, “Should foreigners be allowed to break the law?” The point is whether a system is predictable enough, proportionate enough, and trustworthy enough that people dare to put their lives into it.
If even a situation like this cannot be seen as a warning sign, then the phrase “investment environment” is being understood in only the most superficial way.
Ross, based on the title you wrote, “I was forcibly driven out of my home. If you are planning to come to Taiwan to invest and build your life and career, you are a fool,” the intended meaning clearly seems to be that your case has to do with foreign investment.
But in fact, your case has nothing to do with foreign investment.
If your point is that Taiwan’s judgment in this case was improper and violated proportionality, then I agree with you on that.
1. Your case has nothing to do with foreigners.
2. Your case has nothing to do with investment.
3. Your case is a Personal Data Protection Act issue.
4. Your case may involve a proportionality problem.
So please explain: what does this have to do with coming to Taiwan to invest?
Thank you for the suggestion. I understand your point.
But my title was not chosen to create emotion for its own sake. The reason it is strong is that the consequences for me were never merely an abstract legal discussion. This is not a classroom question about statutory interpretation. It is something that actually destroyed the life, work, home, and future plans I had built over fifteen years in Taiwan.
If this were only an ordinary legal dispute, then yes, I would agree it could be discussed more narrowly in terms of statutory interpretation, judicial discretion, and legal remedies. But that is exactly the problem: when the result has become this severe, and when the official account itself contains inconsistencies serious enough to raise doubt, then the matter can no longer honestly be reduced to a detached academic discussion.
My title is strong because the consequences were strong, not because I am trying to inflame people. To me, it is not “mismatched” with the subject at all. On the contrary, the outcome itself is so serious that I cannot honestly describe it in a casual tone as though it were some small matter.
I do not object to discussing the legal issues themselves. But any meaningful discussion has to include proportionality, procedural fairness, institutional predictability, and the devastating effect this case had on a long-term foreign resident. If all of that is removed, then what remains is not real discussion, but only an abstraction that strips away the human reality.
If your discussion were focused at the time on whether the law was outdated, whether there was judicial discretion, and whether the legal remedy system had problems, then I think many people would be willing to discuss those issues with you.
But using this kind of title and framing makes it hard for people to discuss the matter objectively and in a way that fits the real substance.
Of course, I am not a party to the case, and I have no way of determining all the facts clearly. This is only my personal suggestion.
What the Exchange Actually Reveals
This was not a loss on my part.
The other commenter sounded measured, but that is not the same thing as being right. What he really did was narrow the frame to the one most flattering to the system: “this is just a legal issue, maybe with some proportionality concern.” That move sounds calm because it removes the human being from the story.
My argument was stronger because it kept the real stakes visible. I was not claiming that foreigners should be above the law. I was pointing out that when a state outcome destroys a person’s home, work, future, and fifteen-year life in a place, it becomes a warning about institutional trust, predictability, and whether outsiders are genuinely safe there.
It also becomes a human-rights question. Once both Taiwan and Canada publicly associate themselves with ICCPR standards, it is no longer persuasive to wave away a case like this as though it were merely an unfortunate but ordinary legal dispute. The entire point of rights language is that it is supposed to matter when outcomes become arbitrary, disproportionate, and destructive. If it disappears precisely at that moment, then the public is entitled to wonder whether those commitments are substantive or merely decorative.
The most valuable takeaway from the exchange is how reflexively many people defend institutions and cultural assumptions. They hear “law,” and they stop thinking. They hear “Taiwan,” and they assume criticism must be exaggeration. They hear “foreigner,” and they imagine equality that often does not exist in lived practice. That reflexive loyalty to state and culture is precisely what allows disproportionate harm to be normalized.
The deeper issue: this was not simply one person disagreeing with me. It was a small, public example of how thoroughly people can be trained to trust official labels, national self-image, and the cult of government over the obvious moral and human weight of what actually happened.
Patterns of Unequal Vulnerability: Traffic, Evidence, and Escalation
One reason I reject the fantasy that foreigners and locals always experience the same system in the same way is that I saw too many signs to the contrary. In traffic incidents, for example, I repeatedly encountered a pattern locals themselves joked about: when a foreigner is involved, camera footage somehow becomes hard to find, unavailable, or suddenly less useful.
Whether every such case is deliberate is not even the point. The point is the effect. The foreigner becomes uniquely vulnerable at the exact moment objective evidence matters most. That is not what equal footing feels like.
This is why the line “a Taiwanese person would have been treated the same way” rings hollow to me. It is easy to say in theory. It is much harder to believe after years of actually living inside a system where outsiders often feel that neutrality gets thinner the moment conflict starts.
Important distinction: I am not making a childish claim that every Taiwanese person is prejudiced or every dispute is rigged. I am saying that I experienced a broader pattern of discriminatory vulnerability as a foreign resident, and pretending that such patterns do not exist is part of what makes them so hard to confront.
Exclusion in Practice: Outsider Logic Becoming “Normal”
One of the clearest examples I personally encountered had nothing to do with court. It was social exclusion stated openly and matter-of-factly, as if exclusion by group identity were simply practical. Experiences like that matter because they reveal a mentality: if one outsider causes trouble, then outsiders as a category become suspect.
That mindset does not stay confined to nightlife or casual interaction. It shapes how people view credibility, belonging, and who gets the benefit of the doubt. Once you have lived with that logic long enough, it becomes much harder to believe comforting claims that foreigners and locals simply move through the same systems in the same way.
That is why the public exchange above matters. The commenter treated equality as an assumption. My lived experience taught me to see it as a claim that often collapses under pressure.
Video Evidence Vault
I keep the rougher or more detailed material here in foldouts so the main post stays readable while the supporting record remains available to anyone who wants to go deeper.
Main case overview videos
These are the quickest way for a new reader to understand the wider context.
Work / school / environment videos
Background material showing conditions, environment, and the broader texture of life there.
Traffic / missing evidence cluster
An example of how ordinary disputes can turn unstable fast when objective evidence becomes slippery.
Why this matters: in one traffic incident, objective recording ended up being the difference between a manageable outcome and another example of the outsider losing by default. That is exactly the sort of fragility that makes official claims of equal treatment difficult to accept at face value.
The larger point is not only what happened that day. It is how quickly ordinary life can become dangerous when the foreign resident cannot trust that facts will stay facts once conflict begins.
TV coverage
Broadcast and press material.
Noise sabotage archive
Collapsed by default because it is a lot. Available for readers who want the broader evidentiary background.
