At the start of this week, it seemed that the situation with Occupy Central had reached a height of utmost tension. Protest leaders from Occupy Central and student leaders alike were calling for protestors to withdraw as far back as Sunday, after the brutal use of police force and fear that subsequent violence might prove deadly....
The unthinkable has happened. Where just a month ago, it seemed as though Occupy Central was on the decline, that Hong Kong would see no mass protest over China’s refusal to permit free elections for Chief Executive, the highest leadership position within Hong Kong’s government, Hong Kong’s student activists have seized the day...
On Saturday, September 27th, New Bloom’s Brian Hioe caught up with noted Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng at a solidarity action for Hong Kong in Times Square, New York City, organized by 全球聲援香港爭取真普選 United for Democracy: Global Solidarity with Hong Kong...
Hung Chun-Hsiu (洪淳修) is a documentary filmmaker and, most recently, the director of The Lost Sea (刪海經). His other films include Fishermen in the City (河口人),《城市農民曆》and《船長要抓狂》. On August 21st, he was interviewed by New Bloom's Brian Hioe. The following is the English language translation of the interview....
Does the possibility exist for Hong Kong to attain democracy? This question has yet to be settled. In the face of China’s refusal to allow non-vetted candidates to run for Hong Kong’s Chief Executive, the highest political position in the Hong Kong government, the stage is set for Occupy Central to once again seize control of Hong Kong’s Central district, the city’s financial and economic heart...
On its 121s day, the longstanding Songyan occupation, protesting the unlawful cutting down of trees in the area outside the site of the future Taipei Dome, near Songshan Cultural and Creative Park, faced its greatest tribulation to date. A police raid upon the occupation encampment was conducted at 2 AM which, according to those present, brought in approximately forty to fifty police officers...
If the artwork of Hwang Buh-Ching can be said to be concerned with the artistic representation of “homeland,” as his current exhibition “Homeland: Edge of Desolation” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei suggests in representing Taiwan, Hwang points to both falsity and authenticity...
The specter of Taiwanese politics is everywhere in the artwork of Dean I-Mei. While, certainly, the artist himself poses his recent exhibition in light of a search for personal identity in the title “Wanted Dean I-Mei,” his search for individual identity is one deeply bound up with Taiwan’s state of unbelonging in the world...
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...
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.