The first-ever policy presentation for political parties was held on Wednesday. This saw some controversy, with the Taiwan Statebuilding Party, Taiwan Obasan Political Equality Party, and Green Party Taiwan demonstrating that they were given less time to speak than larger more electorally viable parties such as the DPP, KMT, and TPP. While there were sixteen parties represented, the following article will only focus on some of the parties...
One of the most ambiguous of the campaign promises to date offered by Taiwanese politicians has been the pan-Blue camp’s call for a shift to a cabinet-style system. It is unclear what this would consist of, seeing as such a shift would require constitutional changes in Taiwan’s political system...
KMT presidential candidate Hou You-yi has begun to lean into attacks on DPP presidential candidate Lai Ching-te over the death penalty. Hou has called on Lai to clarify what he claims to be an unclear stance on the death penalty...
According to Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen, the next-generation Taiwanese indigenous fighter plane is under development. This, in Tsai’s words, is to continue her administration’s defense policy...
The KMT has begun leaning into political attacks on the national text alert sent out by the Ministry of National Defense yesterday. These attacks have increasingly taken the tenor of alleging that the text message alert was not a mistake, in that the English wording of the alert referred to the satellite launch as a "missile" launch, but a fake incident entirely concocted by the DPP for the sake of elections. The KMT has focused attacks on this rather than criticizing the substance of the text message alert, which led to confusion, or the Tsai administration itself’s apparent confusion. The incident takes place mere days before the presidential election is to take place on Saturday...
The KMT called on Premier Chen Chien-jen to report to the legislature about Medigen contracts yesterday. Chen emphasized that there was nothing illicit about the deal during his report...
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.