The KMT has continued to defend a trip made by vice chair Andrew Hsia to China, in spite of criticisms from within the party, from the Mainland Affairs Council, and from the pan-Green camp...
Miaoli county Labor and Youth Development deputy head Tu Jung-hui was questioned by police earlier this month in connection with Ugandan students at the Chung Chou University in Changhua forced to work in factories. The investigation was carried out by the Changhua District Prosecutors’ Office and the Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau’s Taichung Office...
Jacobin's latest confused foray into commenting on Taiwan proves to be a video on its YouTube channel, the Jacobin Show, featuring Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad. Following on the heels of an article that labeled individuals that brought up the exclusion of Taiwanese voices from a conversation about their future as “warmongers,” rather than get anyone Taiwanese to discuss the Pelosi visit, Jacobin seems to have gone with Chomsky and Prashad...
A recent draft bill by the National Communications Commission, the draft Digital Intermediary Services Act, has led to polarized reactions from Internet freedom advocates, with some taking a stance against the bill, while others support it. The bill addresses cybercrimes, such as revenge porn, deepfakes, fraud, and disinformation...
Efforts to assist Taiwanese human rights trafficking victims in Cambodia have become contested between the KMT and the DPP as of late, in a timeframe shortly before elections...
Following US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, tensions in the region seem set to escalate. Although in a recent Pentagon briefing, US government spokespersons claimed that they had anticipated China’s moves, China’s actions still came as a surprise...
The Constitutional Court ruled earlier this week that the Tsai administration’s nationalization of seventeen irrigation organizations was constitutional. The move was one that was resisted by the KMT, seeing as it was aimed at breaking the traditional pan-Blue stranglehold over irrigation organizations...
Imagine if after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that a leading Anglophone left academic journal put out an article blaming the invasion on the failure of Ukrainians to embrace Russian culture. Putin justified the invasion by claiming that Ukraine did not have a language, identity, or culture of its own outside of Russian culture and was wholly an invention of the Bolsheviks, so Ukraine’s existence as a polity could justifiably be nullified. The invasion of Ukraine, then, is the fault of Ukrainians for failing to embrace the “Russo-world”...
American leftist magazine Jacobin continues to plumb the depths of bad writing on Taiwan that does not bother to consult Taiwanese voices about their own future, with a recent article by Chicago-based writer Branko Marcetic. Instead of anything like, say, speaking to Taiwanese to see what they think of the odds of conflict with China are, what one instead sees is the usual insularity of western leftists who are more concerned with projecting the specter of American empire onto the non-western world to self-flagellate about themselves rather than finding pragmatic solutions to avoid conflict...
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.
