The unexpected death of Shen Yi-ming, Taiwan’s military chief of staff, in a helicopter crash earlier today is likely to provide fodder for electioneering in the coming days. While both the Tsai and Han campaigns have announced a three-day break from campaign activities in the wake of Shen’s death, it is probable that the incident will eventually be used by the Han campaign as a means of attacking the Tsai administration. It is also highly likely that the incident will become the object of Chinese disinformation efforts...
Protests took place in Hong Kong over the New Year’s, with police firing tear gas and water cannons shortly after midnight on New Year’s Eve, and a march yesterday, New Year’s Day, that drew over 1.03 million attendees according to organizers...
The party policy presentations which took place on December 6th, as organized by the Citizens’ Congress Watch, largely proved a non-starter in terms of genuine debate between the parties. Instead, debate largely took place between the pan-Green and pan-Blue alliances...
With the claim that Taiwanese universities are welcoming students from Hong Kong unable to finish their studies due to the ongoing protests, perhaps some caution is warranted as to whether universities have genuinely taken action to help Hongkongers or whether this is simply just virtue signaling by Taiwanese universities...
Compared to the three policy presentation debates which have taken place to date, the presidential debate which was held yesterday afternoon allowed for more substantive exchanges between the three presidential candidates that will be running in 2020 elections...
A rally against the KMT, specifically targeting KMT legislator Wu Sz-huai and other pro-China legislators, was held outside DPP headquarters tonight. The rally, which was attended by several thousand, featured many of the star politicians from the DPP and affiliated pan-Green parties...
The third and final televised presidential policy presentation took place yesterday, consisting of three rounds of exchanges between presidential candidates Tsai Ing-wen of the DPP, Han Kuo-yu of the KMT, and James Soong of the PFP. Overall, the last policy presentation was probably the least substantive, with only Tsai referring to concrete policy and Soong and Han focusing primarily on attacking Tsai...
Controversy regarding a new anti-infiltration bill that the Tsai administration intends to pass before the end of the year largely proves a false issue. Namely, while Tsai seems in a rush to pass the bill before the year’s end and the KMT claims that the DPP is infringing on political freedoms and shrugging off legal oversight measures to pass the bill so quickly, it is actually quite unlikely the bill will do much to stop Chinese efforts to influence Taiwanese elections...