A recent police raid in Hong Kong on the live house Hidden Agenda have provoked anger in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other parts of the Sinophone world. But it should also raise important parallels for music and arts venues struggling to survive under conditions of rising rents, gentrification, and targeting by politicians...
The suicide of bestselling author Lin Yi-Han has provoked no shortage of editorializing and public discussion in Taiwan, seeing as Lin's suicide is attributed to depression over a sexual assault incident which occurred nine years ago in a cram school, the perpetrator being a teacher at the cram school. Lin’s bestselling novel, which was autobiographical in nature, detailed the incident...
With a recent incident in Australia last week in which the Taiwanese delegation to the Kimberley Process conference on blood diamond trafficking was expelled following the demands of the Chinese delegation and affiliated African delegations, however counterintuitively, we can observe an opportunity for Taiwan to make its plight known to the international world. The real question is whether the Tsai administration is willing to take action to make Taiwan’s plight better known to the international world...
With the struggle to push the “Forward-Looking” Infrastructure Development Program into law, the DPP may be kicking a hornet’s nest if it is unable to handle the matter in a way satisfactory to the public...
With recent contention regarding judicial reform, part of what would be at stake is questions of the fundamental basis upon which Taiwan’s legal system is built...
Angry reactions have broken out from the indigenous community and their allies after police attempted to remove the current occupation on Ketagalan Boulevard in front of the presidential office demonstrating against the failure of the Tsai administration to restore traditional lands...
With recent polling by the Taiwanese Public Opinion Foundation indicating that the majority of the Taiwanese public is dissatisfied with the government, this would be a sign of the Tsai administration’s failure to maintain the political momentum it rode into power on. However, although this does not absolve Tsai from blame for her political actions either, perhaps this ultimately is due to the characteristics of Taiwan’s democracy as a result of the process of Taiwanese democratization...
China's apparent lack of interest in recovering money stolen by Chinese fraud victims by Taiwanese criminals illustrates that cross-strait relations have apparently taken precedent over settling questions of justice for China. If the Tsai administration is smart, it will leverage on this fact...
The debacle of KMT chair elections is illustrative of the party’s internal crisis, as well as the means by which the party is highly unlikely to overcome its current crisis, no matter who wins the race. Namely, KMT chair candidates have as of late taken to doubling down on accusations of vote-buying, bribery, and fraud within the election process after it was found that many of petitions submitted by chair hopefuls to qualify for the election contained false signatures or repeat signatures between multiple petitions...
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.