The spread of a previously unknown strain of coronavirus originally detected in the central Chinese city of Wuhan should raise issues concerning Taiwan’s exclusion from international health organizations such as the World Health Organization and its governing body, the World Health Association...
A protest assembly in Hong Kong was forcibly dispersed by police yesterday, with many criticisms of the Hong Kong Police Force’s handling of the matter...
Plans by Taiwanese company Formosa Plastics to build a 9.2 billion USD plastics complex in the St. James Parish in Louisiana should once again call attention to Formosa’s blatant disregard for the environment and human life in other countries...
New Bloom editor Brian Hioe spoke to Asylum Access, an international NGO working on asylum issues, about the status of asylum laws in Taiwan, the organization's work, and its efforts to work on asylum issues in Taiwan...
The city of Prague breaking off a sister city agreement with Beijing to sign a sister city agreement in Taipei instead is likely to be misunderstood in Taiwan, seeing as this may be intended as a move in Czech domestic politics more than anything else...
Ko Wen-je's Taiwan People’s Party may be the largest uncertain factor after the results of the 2020 elections, seeing as the party is a newly emergent political force...
The results of 2020 elections led to the reelection of incumbent president Tsai Ing-wen and the DPP retaining its majority in the legislature. However, how should we analyze the election results?...
Tsai Ing-wen of the DPP won reelection by large margins today. Tsai won over eight million votes, winning 57% of votes, and handily defeating her opponent, Han Kuo-Yu of the KMT. In the legislature, the DPP took a total of 61 seats, the KMT 38 seats, the TPP five seats, the NPP three seats, the Taiwan Statebuilding Party one seat...
In tracking political developments in the five years since the Sunflower Movement, one has observed a number of unexpected developments in the past year. First, one has seen increasingly large internal splits among the Third Force, and the sudden and unexpected resurgence of the KMT, which led to the consolidation of the pan-Green camp within the DPP...
There is an observable pattern of last-minute scandals breaking the news shortly before elections are set to take place in Taiwan. This seems to have been the case in the last 72 hours, with a number of scandals about the KMT that have suddenly erupted out in the open, as well as, to a lesser extent, the TPP. Most scandals are relatively minor, with the exception of explosive allegations against Alex Tsai of the KMT, which could potentially have a strong impact on elections tomorrow...
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.
