Public comments made late last month by Hedy Lee, the eldest daughter of the recently deceased Lee Ao and a media personality in her own right, have provoked ire from members of the Jewish community in Taiwan...
Anger has followed suit after the winner of a contest to design a new Taiwanese identification card had only 46 votes, disregarding the most popular design, which had 97,498 votes. The winning design was perceived as pro-independence in nature, due to its titling...
Demonstrations against a plan by the Vietnamese government to create special economic zones that will be leased to China took place outside the Vietnamese representative office in Taipei last weekend. Fears have been raised that this will allow for Chinese economic and political influence to enter Vietnam, with China eventually aiming to assimilate and absorb Vietnam wholesale. Solidarity rallies have also taken place in Taiwan...
Controversy has broken out over actions by Taipei Agricultural Products Marketing Corporation director Wu Yin-ning. While opponents of Wu allege corruption or at least incompetence, defenders of Wu allege that Wu has been caught in the crossfire between the KMT, DPP, and Taipei mayor Ko Wen-Je...
Two demonstrations regarding education took place over last weekend. The first took place on Saturday afternoon outside the Executive Yuan and concerned itself with anticipated tuition hikes slated to be announced by Executive Yuan later this month. The second demonstration took place on Sunday morning outside the Ministry of Education, as an emergency mobilization against the sudden suspension of operations of the Asia-Pacific Institute of Creativity...
It will prove difficult trying to evaluate what the effects of the meeting between North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and American president Donald Trump will be going forward...
The opening of the new American Institute in Taiwan complex in Neihu was largely a non-event today. Apart from being overshadowed by the Trump-Kim summit that took place concurrently in Singapore, the building move signals little about any shift in American policy on Taiwan, regardless of boilerplate talk by American and Taiwanese policymakers...
Outrage has broken out in Hong Kong after the sentencing of Edward Leung in Hong Kong to six years in prison for his role in the events known as the “Fishball Revolution”. What now for Hong Kong activists?...
China's stratagem to force airlines to remove mention of “Taiwan” as a separate country on their websites seems to have been a largely successful one. This can be observed in microcosm with the example of Qantas Airlines, an Australian airline which initially resisted impositions by China, but even buckled...
A recent five-day visit to Taiwan late last month by Haitian president Jovenel Moïse ended with Haiti walking away with a 150 million dollar investment by Taiwan in Haiti’s power grid...
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, as well as board member of the Taiwan Foreign Correspondents' Club.
