In comparing the Tsai administration’s attempt to target illegal KMT party assets in Taiwan and the current anti-corruption campaign undertaken by the Xi administration in China, perhaps we can draw out some of the differences between the Taiwanese and Chinese political systems...
A recent lawsuit filed alleging racial discrimination at Harvard against Asian-Americans due to affirmative action programs purports to be in the interest of Asian-Americans, but this would in fact be the attempt of white conservatives to repeal affirmative action programs to deny black and Latino students access to institutions of higher education...
Uncertain times are ahead following an incident this morning in which North Korea fired a missile which passed over Japan, eventually landing 730 miles off the coast of Cape Erimo of Hokkaido. This would be an event which significantly escalates the possibility of conflict breaking out in the Asia Pacific region...
A land appropriation case would be presently unfolding in Tainan, with plans by the city government to expand a highway in Sigang District protested by local residents...
A recent statement by the Association for Taiwan Literature calling on the Ministry of Education to change the education curriculum in Taiwan to focus less on traditional Chinese classics and instead to draw on materials more suitable to contemporary Taiwan is the end result of a series of debates in past months about differences between Taiwanese and Chinese literature, as well as language learning in Taiwan...
Controversy over the Taipei Dome continues, having dragged out at this point for years, with all members of the Taipei Dome safety review committee listed as defendants in the ongoing criminal investigation into the Taipei Dome’s construction process. The controversy is revealing of the endemic problem of political corruption in infrastructure development projects in Taiwan...
A recent essay by McKenzie Wark on Chinese New Left intellectual Wang Hui published on Verso Books’ blog proves an exercise in western academic leftists’ lack of knowledge of Asia and their inadvertent support of individuals with politics that they would likely find repulsive, if not for lack of sufficient knowledge about Asia and wishful desire to find analogues to themselves in non-western countries. It is instructive to examine this essay more closely in order to understand what we might term a form of leftist orientalism...
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.
