Recent public reactions following the stabbing death of two police officers by an escaped jail inmate, surnamed Lin, illustrate the long path to be walked for abolishing capital punishment in Taiwan. The murders took place in late August...
The KMT has experienced further controversy regarding the 1992 Consensus, following a recent interview by party chair Eric Chu with Deutsche Welle, as well as an article published by the CPPCC Daily, a Chinese state-run media outlet. It may not be surprising to note that both incidents have been leveraged on by the pan-Green camp for political ammunition, particularly given that the KMT’s unwillingness to swerve away from the 1992 Consensus continues to be a major weakness for the party...
Five members of a speech therapists’ union were sentenced t in Hong Kong earlier this month on sedition charges over a series of children’s books. The charges used by police date back to British colonial times and the five have been sentenced to nineteen months in prison...
Chen Feng-mei, the DPP mayor of Budai township in Chiayi, is currently under investigation for illegal dumping. This proves one of a series of prominent cases involving illegal dumping in Taiwan, or otherwise involving politicians implicated in land issues...
It did not exactly come as a surprise when Taipei deputy mayor Vivian Huang, also known as Huang Shan-shan, tendered her resignation late last month in preparation for a mayoral run...
The arrest of a 28-year-old Vietnamese migrant worker for working jobs unrelated to his original job as a factory worker should draw attention to the inability of migrant workers to take on part-time work and other forms of employment according to current laws...
Several dozen protested in Taoyuan on Thursday in front of the city hall on September 1st, calling for the preservation of Qing dynasty railroads. Ironically enough, the historic railroads are threatened by construction for a contemporary MRT station...
The Control Yuan condemned the construction process for the Miramar Resort in Taitung late last month, arguing that an investigation should be carried out into the construction process for the beach resort. The Control Yuan made the assessment after visiting the site of the planned Miramar Resort and interviewing local residents...
UMC founder and former chair Robert Tsao has gotten into an unusual dispute with pan-Blue news network CtiTV regarding recent plans by Tsao to donate 1 billion NT to efforts to strengthen civil defense in Taiwan...
Questions have been raised about whether an upcoming referendum to lower the voting age to 18 will pass. Concerns have been raised about whether the referendum will meet the referendum may not meet the 9.65 million votes necessary to pass constitutional changes. This means that young people can serve in the army, drink, and are able to vote in national referendums, seeing as changes to the Referendum Act in December 2017 lowered the age for voting in the referendum from 20 to 18, but they cannot vote for elected representatives in Taiwan currently...
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.
