With the claim that Taiwanese universities are welcoming students from Hong Kong unable to finish their studies due to the ongoing protests, perhaps some caution is warranted as to whether universities have genuinely taken action to help Hongkongers or whether this is simply just virtue signaling by Taiwanese universities...
Compared to the three policy presentation debates which have taken place to date, the presidential debate which was held yesterday afternoon allowed for more substantive exchanges between the three presidential candidates that will be running in 2020 elections...
A rally against the KMT, specifically targeting KMT legislator Wu Sz-huai and other pro-China legislators, was held outside DPP headquarters tonight. The rally, which was attended by several thousand, featured many of the star politicians from the DPP and affiliated pan-Green parties...
The third and final televised presidential policy presentation took place yesterday, consisting of three rounds of exchanges between presidential candidates Tsai Ing-wen of the DPP, Han Kuo-yu of the KMT, and James Soong of the PFP. Overall, the last policy presentation was probably the least substantive, with only Tsai referring to concrete policy and Soong and Han focusing primarily on attacking Tsai...
Controversy regarding a new anti-infiltration bill that the Tsai administration intends to pass before the end of the year largely proves a false issue. Namely, while Tsai seems in a rush to pass the bill before the year’s end and the KMT claims that the DPP is infringing on political freedoms and shrugging off legal oversight measures to pass the bill so quickly, it is actually quite unlikely the bill will do much to stop Chinese efforts to influence Taiwanese elections...
Clashes between protestors and police took place again in Hong Kong over the last few days, with demonstrations over Christmas coming under assault from riot police...
Chinese president Xi Jinping visited Macau for three days last week in order to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the 1999 handover of Macau from Portuguese control to Chinese control...
Though under-discussed in English-language writing on the 2020 presidential and legislative elections that are set to take place in January next year, the “Democracy Frontline” interparty alliance proves one of the more significant formations where youth participation in electoral politics is concerned. The Democracy Frontline consists of young independent, third party, or DPP candidates that have aligned to tacitly endorse Tsai Ing-wen’s reelection campaign...
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.
