In 2019, on his very first day as Premier, Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) arrived at Taoyuan International Airport and ordered 100 percent X-ray screening of all carry-on luggage from high-risk regions. New machines were purchased, fines were tightened, and the measure was presented as decisive leadership — a strongman's answer to the threat of African swine fever reaching Taiwan's pork industry.
Seven years later, the policy is still in place. What was framed as an emergency response has quietly become permanent, never reviewed, never reformed. The queues at Taoyuan remain. And the cost — to travelers, to productivity, and to Taiwan's credibility as a modern state — keeps compounding.
The Illusion of Rigor
Late at night, returning nationals shuffle through narrow corridors while rows of staff perform repetitive, manual inspections on every bag that passes through. This does not project national seriousness. It projects administrative exhaustion — a system that has mistaken busyness for effectiveness.
Taiwan presents itself to the world as an AI and semiconductor powerhouse. Yet at its front door, it runs what amounts to a low-tech screening operation that prioritizes visible effort over measurable results. AI processing capacity doubles roughly every three months. In seven years, semiconductor fabrication has advanced by multiple generations. Yet the agency responsible for border biosecurity has not managed to deploy automated organic-material detection, intelligent risk-profiling, or precision sampling systems. The technology exists. The will to use it does not.
The bureaucratic logic is straightforward, if rarely stated openly: making travelers queue requires no political courage, while streamlining the process creates accountability. Universal screening produces the best-looking figures in a policy report. It signals effort without requiring thought.
The Hidden Cost Nobody Calculates
Taiwan receives approximately 13.5 million inbound travelers per year. If each person loses an average of 20 minutes to this screening ritual, the national total exceeds 4.5 million hours annually. At a conservative average productive value of NT$400 per hour, the social cost in lost time alone exceeds NT$1.8 billion per year — roughly NT$12 billion across the seven years this policy has been in force.
The government defends universal screening as protection for an NT$80 billion pork industry. But it has chosen the most expensive and least efficient method available. Had a fraction of that social cost been redirected toward R&D seven years ago, Taiwan could today be operating world-class, frictionless biosecurity infrastructure. Instead, it burns public time — because to a bureaucracy, citizens' time is free. It costs officials nothing, and it shields them from any accusation of laxity.
Political Theater Dressed as Border Security
The reason this policy survives unchallenged is not technical. It is political. Anyone who questions the screening regime can be labeled as someone who wants to destroy the pork industry. The government has successfully fused the memory of Taiwan's devastating 1997 foot-and-mouth disease outbreak with the current administrative arrangement, making criticism politically radioactive.
The same logic appeared recently when an elderly farmer in his eighties was detained for failing to report a sick pig that had died on his property. The detention was disproportionate and widely seen as absurd — but it followed the same pattern as the airport queues. In both cases, the government's priority was not proportionate enforcement or measurable biosecurity outcomes. It was the performance of outrage, the appearance of zero tolerance, directed at a public audience.
Both the detained farmer and the exhausted traveler serve the same function: they allow officials to demonstrate severity while avoiding the harder work of actually modernizing the systems they oversee.
What Science-Based Management Would Actually Look Like
Replacing theater with effectiveness is not complicated. It requires three things.
First, data-driven risk profiling. High-risk flights and travelers with relevant records should receive targeted, intensive inspection. The roughly 90 percent of travelers who present no elevated risk should move through quickly. Modern border management is built on probability, not universal suspicion.
Second, automated detection technology. Tunnel-based organic compound scanners already exist and can screen passengers as they walk, without requiring them to unpack and repack luggage like inmates in a processing line. Taiwan has the engineering capacity to develop and deploy such systems. It lacks only the political will to prioritize them.
Third, enforcement that is actually proportionate. The current system pairs theatrical screening with toothless enforcement — first-time violators are often let off with a verbal warning to discard the item. Genuine deterrence requires meaningful penalties, applied consistently, to the people who actually pose a risk. Shifting resources from universal screening to targeted enforcement with real consequences would do more for biosecurity than any number of tired queues.
The Queue Is a Mirror
For seven years, returning Taiwanese and visiting travelers alike have asked some version of the same question: why can't a country this technologically capable manage its own airport more efficiently?
The queue at Taoyuan in the small hours of the morning is not a sign of national vigilance. It is a sign of a bureaucracy that has chosen the path of least political resistance and called it policy. It protects officials from criticism while systematically disrespecting the time and dignity of every person who passes through. （Related： Taiwan Discloses $38.5 Billion Defense Procurement Plan, Air Defense Missiles Top Spending ｜ Latest ）
Storm Media supports protecting Taiwan's agricultural industries. But protection built on performance rather than evidence is not protection — it is a liability. A government that cannot manage the efficiency and dignity of its own front door, and that governs through prohibition and spectacle rather than science and accountability, is not falling short of best practice. It is moving in the wrong direction entirely. Taiwan deserves governance that is modern, evidence-based, and genuinely respectful of its citizens — not officials who perform effort while avoiding results.
