Controversy has broken out regarding the Tsai administration’s appointment of Huang Huang-xiong as head of the transitional justice promotion committee...
The KMT has probably learned little from its authoritarian past with the choice of Hou You-yi as its mayoral candidate for New Taipei City, given Hou's actions during the authoritarian period. However, the DPP has also attempted to recruit Hou in the past...
Electoral politics in 2018 elections and beyond stand to be shaken up by the recent formation of the “Formosa Alliance”, which intends to push for reform of the Referendum Act in order to allow for a referendum on amending the name of the nation and settling long-standing issues regarding independence/unification. This referendum push could pose a challenge to the DPP in terms of seizing its traditional base...
Claims by the Executive Yuan last month that it intends to realize Taiwan’s first unicorn company in the next two years would simply another case in point in which Taiwan desperately chases after what it perceives to be “international trends”, but has considered little of what that would mean, nor has taken the concrete steps to realize its claimed aspirations...
China lifting caps on the number of Taiwanese films allowed into China, the banning of the film "Missing Johnny," and controversy regarding the Man Booker Prize are recent incidents in which film and literature continue to be sites of contestation regarding Taiwanese identity...
Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je continues to come under fire for the eviction of protest occupations around the Legislative Yuan. However, Ko is accused of selective policing practices in evicting occupation encampments with closer ties to pro-Taiwan civil society while allowing pan-Blue occupations to remain...
Planned population controls by the Chinese government in its key cities are indicative of the priorities of the CCP when it comes to China’s future development. Namely, both Shanghai and Beijing put population caps into place last year, with Shanghai setting in place a limit of 25 million and Beijing setting in place a population cap of 23 million...
Pushes by the KMT for a referendum on food imports from radiation-affected areas in Japan and air pollution are ironic appropriations of referendum reform in Taiwan. This is in line with broader attempts by the KMT to imitate tactics of Taiwanese civil society...
The eviction last week of indigenous vendors outside a former residence of Zhang Xueliang in Chingchuan, Wufeng Township near Hsinchu raises a number of issues. Namely, indigenous vendors have operated outside the residence for twenty years. Many vendors have no other means of livelihood if they are forced to relocate...
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.
