A press conference by US president Donald Trump took an unexpected turn yesterday after Trump announced not only the end of Hong Kong’s favorable trade status under American law, but that the US would be withdrawing from the World Health Organization. The WHO is the UN agency responsible for global health. The move is expected to have large repercussions on both Taiwan and Hong Kong...
The constitutional court ruled to decriminalize adultery yesterday in a ruling which has been hailed as a step forward for sexual freedoms in Taiwan...
With Paraguay's senate voting last month on whether to change diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China, the Paraguayan senate voted to retain diplomatic relations with Taiwan by a vote of 25 to 16. However, attempts by China to poach diplomatic allies of Taiwan are likely to continue into Tsai's second term...
With Tsai beginning her second term as president, Tsai’s cabinet saw a minor reshuffle earlier this month. At the same time, with most positions remaining the same, Tsai’s cabinet primarily represents continuity more than anything else...
It is possible that protests yesterday in Hong Kong will be remembered as a pivotal event. Although yesterday’s demonstration is comparable to many of the protests that took place in the past year before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, in the wake of the protests yesterday, American Secretary of State Mike Pompeo certified to Congress that Hong Kong was no longer autonomous from China...
With the second reading of a bill aimed at criminalizing mockery of the Chinese national anthem today in the Hong Kong Legislative Council, protests took place across Hong Kong. However, police violence against demonstrators began early in the afternoon...
Recent efforts by Kaohsiung mayor Han Kuo-yu to turn around his image illustrate that the Han administration may be too little, too late. Han is currently facing a recall vote, which is scheduled to take place on June 6th. It is generally thought that this recall vote has a high chance of succeeding, seeing as the number of signatures obtained for the petition needed to hold the recall vote had close to the number of votes needed to recall Han...
The Central Epidemic Command Center reported another day of zero new COVID-19 cases in Taiwan today. The total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Taiwan remains at 441, with 415 of those cases having recovered...
Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen took to Facebook yesterday night to issue a statement regarding the ongoing protests in Hong Kong. While Tsai expressed support of Hongkongers, it proves hasty to assume that Tsai was proposing any concrete measure to aid Hongkongers out of a sense of solidarity. In fact, if it proves to be more than a vague statement that Tsai has no real intention of acting on, Tsai’s statement could be interpreted as aimed at putting further distance between Taiwan and Hong Kong more than anything else...
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.
