Constitutional reform is set to take center stage as a leading issue in the current legislative session, with a number of key issues on the table. However, it is less clear what the ultimate results of constitutional reform will be, given conflicting and irreconcilable imperatives between the pan-Green and pan-Blue camps...
The KMT surprised yesterday by proposing two resolutions that passed unanimously in the Legislative Yuan, in a rare show of bipartisanship in Taiwanese electoral politics...
DPP legislators Fan Yun and Chang Jui-hsiung recently called for the requirement that elected officials swear their oaths to a portrait of Sun Yat-sen to be dropped. Unsurprisingly, this has prompted backlash from KMT legislators such as Chen Yixin, who accused this of being the DPP’s latest effort to erase symbols of the ROC...
A recent report by the Jamestown Foundation suggested that the Chinese government had begun introducing Xinjiang-style “militarized vocational training” to Tibet, with thousands of Tibetans having passed through such training programs. The report states that over 500,000 Tibetans have passed through such programs—a not insignificant number, seeing as the global Tibetan population is thought to be around 6.5 million...
A number of recent incidents highlight Taiwan’s exclusion from the international community. In particular, reference to even just the name “Taiwan” has sometimes led to strong reactions from China. This occurs at all levels...
Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong was arrested last Thursday, on charges of illegally participating in a demonstration that took place last year in October...
A march against climate change took place today, as organized by the Taiwan Youth Climate Coalition, to commemorate the global climate strike that took place across the world on September 25th. The march was attended by several hundred, despite drizzling rain throughout the day...
Brian Hioe is one of the founding editors of New Bloom. He is a freelance journalist, as well as a translator. A New York native and Taiwanese-American, he has an MA in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University and graduated from New York University with majors in History, East Asian Studies, and English Literature. He was Democracy and Human Rights Service Fellow at the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy from 2017 to 2018 and is currently a Non-Resident Fellow at the University of Nottingham's Taiwan Studies Programme.