Taiwan has the second lowest violent crime on Earth, right after Japan. I am an Engineer, I have two masters degrees, and have made decent money in both Taiwan and the USA. I spent a summer and most of an autumn unhoused in Taiwan. In Taipei, I often slept on benches near Hell Valley, and woke up and went to the hotspring in the morning with the older folks who liked to go at that time. Other times I slept around Banciao or other side of the river. Several nice nights, I would wake up to drunk college kids hanging out around me, occasionally falling asleep or passing out for a couple of hours in the same parks I liked.
I got a scooter for about $200 and went further South. Initially I slept in the little gazebos, and later I slept anywhere, and got a hammock with a bugnet to hang up in the trees. I slept on the toy trains in the town South of Sun Moon lake. I slept by the old tree on the Pacific side of Hehuan (and liked camping at various heights on mount Hehuan in the summer, as I could effectively pick the temperature at night). Could swim by waterfalls or snorkel in the ocean near Hualien, then motor to a comfortable altitude, eat a little snack, and sleep. The milky way was generally visible to me. There are also untold beauty in potential cross-island passes above and South of WuJie, but I never made it through that way. I slept in part of the old hotspring near the temples on the Pacific side of Hehuan. Woke up in a warm bath and cops shining flashlights down into the canyon to see me. I slept under the stars. I slept on concrete under gazebos through torrential rains.
There are a lot of very clean public restrooms. I cleaned in the public restrooms or in rivers. Also, I got used to always having napkins in my cargo pants. Keeping clean was the biggest thing I discovered in a few months of this. Also bug spray, though the mosquitos there don’t carry diseases for the most part, so it’s nothing other than a nuisance. A windy spot does better than bug spray and doesn’t smell weird.
I had enough money for all the food and gas I could have used in years. I had public healthcare and permanent residency. I was 35 and no children. Without the threat of crime, and in a mild climate, really, what need would I have for a house?
In the latter part, I was employed managing an English school through an ownership change. A local person found out I was sleeping in a hammock in a Gazebo halfway up Tiger Head Mountain (near Zhong Xin Bei). She was religious (Yi Guan Dao, I think) and all but insisted I rent from her. She made kind of a fuss with the owners and rented me a room really cheap in a large building with many college students. Thus ended my generally very nice experience of safe homelessness.
Since returning to the USA, I sometimes feel I am in danger when I have to stop and get gas for my car. I cannot imagine being unhoused here.
Lower wealth disparity also results in lower crime, particularly lower violent crimes. Taiwan generally has a fairly “sleepy” government and penal system. And for many types of crimes, you can buy your sentence off for the equivalent of about $30 a day (1000 NTD). Not a lot of private gun ownership (non-zero, as aboriginals can hunt, and there are (very very few) skeet ranges, but even the president’s secret service got into trouble for having a handgun in an unauthorized way). I’ve found very stressed and deformed rimfire cartridges out in the woods, apparently from homemade hunting rifles. That’s about it.
The wealth distribution in Taiwan has been great though. Of course, Forumosa Plastics (Wang family), TSMC, Asus, and a few other giants have made bank, but what you find is a vast quantity of people got their “fair share” there. Education rates are high (According to Farid Zakharia, in our Legislative Yuan, nearly everyone has Masters or PhD degrees, highest education in any legislative body on the planet. I’ll also point to a decent gender split, not quite 50%). First Asian country to legalize gay marriage, and Taipei has been having a lot of any-gender restrooms since 10 years or more ago.
So, it’s basically a liberal society, educated to within an inch of their lives, with good wealth distribution and zero whatsoever personal handgun ownership (outside of mobsters, probably). If you get arrested for something like Pot, you can probably spend a few thousand bucks and not serve time, though if you’re a foreigner, you might need to leave the country. Enforcement of laws out in the country is.… like Mayberry. The cops will chat with you and explain they don’t want to clean your brain off the sidewalk if you’re doing something stupid while drunk. Drunk driving is penalized very very heavily, however, as it should be.
On the bad side, people do get away with domestic violence as the law is such (according to a social worker friend of mine), that the police nearly have to witness the crime themselves for you to get into trouble. If you get into a fight with someone, that’s kind of on you and them and the police may not want to be involved in any way (some of my drunken foreigner buddies have been in this situation—it’s good, bad. The legislative Yuan full of smart people also paradoxically sometimes comes to fistfights). If someone hits you with a car (happened to me), probably you won’t get much, if any compensation. Some situations people drive very recklessly. Be careful crossing the street in Taichung or driving on Hehuan mountain road. People need to show off that they “know the road” by passing on a blind mountain curve, likely while chewing binland and drinking Whisbey (sic, it’s an energy drink). Insurance payouts are very low. But then again, so are medical costs, even if you pay out of pocket without the social health system.
People also do all kinds of shady things with food, engine repairs, and other stuff. There’s a lot of “old Asia” mentality in there or Cha bu duo jiou hao le, which translates to “Don’t bother doing more than an approximate job with this.” You can get something like a shady brake job on a motorcycle if you’re not careful. And food quality violations are exposed all the time. People also abuse their Philippine or Southeast Asian household helpers, au pairs, and day laborers. Animal rights are nearly non-existent except for specific cases.
Like every place, there are contradictions. This is Earth and we have humans here. But in some ways, it is the balanced Libertarian Socialist Paradise we always dreamed America could be. Taxes 6% or 20%, and one of the best Healthcare systems on the planet (at about half the GDP rate of USA). Before implementing their socialized medicine system, they did an extensive 5+ year study on impact, usage patterns, etc, and just implemented a good program (which a legislature full of graduate-educated people passed after analysis, probably without fistfights).
Almost every Taiwanese will point out that cities in the USA are far more boring than cities in Taiwan (IMO, the negative comparison is due largely to the USA not at all doing well with 3rd spaces, and also USA sucks if you do not want to drive and cannot afford to just piss away money anytime you want recreation—maybe you just Netflix and chill, which is a lot less fun than using an award-winning public transportation system to visit a beach all day and a famous nightmarket, then home on a Saturday and you may have spent $5-$20).
Of course, with degrees in Sociology and Systems engineering, I would quickly point out it’s a lot more than an order of magnitude easier to administrate a landmass the size of Virginia with < 10% the population of the USA. Especially after a 30 year economic boom where most people got some piece of the pie.
Epistemic Status: I’ve left the safety of narrative reporting and its attendant subjective accuracy, and gotten into a lot of mixed editorial opinions and experiences. Take it all for what it’s worth. I could be factually wrong about almost any of this, due to bad memory, bad information, or things having changed. If you’d prefer to focus on a topic and dig, I am in. If you want to see and experience Taiwan, have some sort of adventure in the lands of snakes and butterflies and mountain rivers and secret shrines, and you’re the kind of person I would enjoy hanging out with, I might even be in.