Brian Hioe

Author Suicide Prompts Public Outcry

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...

Australia Conference Debacle Actually Opportunity For Taiwan

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...

Is An Unpopular Government A Permanent Characteristic Of Taiwanese Democracy?

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...

KMT Chair Race Illustrates Internal Corruption Within Party

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...
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Brian Hioe

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.

丘琦欣,創建破土的編輯之一,專於撰寫社會運動和政治的自由作家偶而亦從事翻譯工作。他自哥倫比亞大學畢業,是亞洲語言及文化科系的碩士,同時擁有紐約大學的歷史,東亞研究及英文文學三項學士學位。