This is the second installment of the two-part interview with J. Michael Cole conducted by Brian Hioe regarding his editorship of Thinking Taiwan, the relation of journalism and activism, and his recently released book, Officially Unofficial: Confessions of a journalist in Taiwan...
J. Michael Cole is editor in chief of Thinking Taiwan, a senior non-resident fellow at the China Policy Institute, University of Nottingham, and an Associate researcher at the French Center for Research on Contemporary China (CEFC) in Taipei. He is the author of the just-published Officially Unofficial: Confessions of a journalist in Taiwan...
This past Friday, approximately 200 protestors gathered outside of the former site of Chang Pharmacy in Dapu, Miaoli. One year ago on July 18th, 2013, the family-owned pharmacy was forcibly demolished in order to make way for commercial development. In September, owner Chang Sen-wen (張森文) was found dead under a bridge. The death was ruled a suicide by police, but there are those who remain suspicious, including Chang’s son...
Meeting Dr. Sun tells of a group of poor Taiwanese high school students’elaborate plot to steal an unused Sun Yat-Sen (孫中山) statue from their high school and sell it for scrap metal...
Following the Sunflower Movement, there have been voices have now begun to speak of eliminating the KMT. And it must be wondered what exactly a Taiwanese political spectrum devoid of the KMT would look like. After all, having existed for the entire duration of what we can speak of as “Taiwanese politics,” it is hard to imagine what Taiwanese politics, period, would look like minus the KMT...
Less discussed in connection with Taiwan and Hong Kong is the recent Article 9 controversy in Japan against the repeal of Japan’s Article 9, which in the past few days has seen the largest mobilizations in Japan since the height of the post-Fukushima anti-nuclear movement two years ago...
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.
