Perhaps the most noteworthy thing about the Qiao Collective’s “Taiwan: An Anti-Imperialist Perspective”, published in the Monthly Review, is to what extent it focuses on premodern history–and to what extent the Taiwanese people are absent from a history purportedly about them. This should not surprise for Qiao, but one still finds one’s self somewhat surprised that the Monthly Review allowed for the publication of a perspective on history that is clearly more cultural nationalist than Marxist...
The Lai administration will soon lift remaining restrictions on food imports from Fukushima disaster-affected Japanese prefectures. This includes Fukushima itself, as well as the prefectures of Chiba, Gunma, Ibaraki, and Tochigi...
China challenges the legitimacy of international law while the US bends international law to its interest. In the Shangri-La Dialogue, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations politely voiced their concerns regarding the deteriorating international rules-based order between the two superpowers. ...
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is having a moment in Taiwan. In particular, Huang has been widely praised in Taiwan after a speech in which he declared that the world was on the precipice of a new Industrial Revolution–involving AI–and that Taiwan was key to this. This occurred on the occasion of a keynote speech by Huang at Computex, one of the major annual tech exhibitions in Taiwan...
Taiwan continues to find itself enmeshed in questionable political alignments, with a recent tweet by President Lai Ching-te congratulating Indian President Narendra Modi on his presidential victory. Modi later responded to this tweet by thanking Lai...
Ten KMT legislators visited Itu Aba/Taiping Island yesterday. Originally, a delegation of twenty legislators were to visit Itu Aba/Taiping Island, but clashes in the legislature over efforts by the KMT to expand legislative powers to allow for the ability to question private individuals and organizations and prosecute them if they do not comply went on into the late night on Friday. As such, half of the original delegation canceled. The visit was likely timed for before the Lai inauguration tomorrow, but the visit has since become overshadowed by news of the clashes, which in itself has become the main news item that casts a shadow over the inauguration...
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company recently won a $6.6 billion grant from the US Department of Commerce to subsidize the construction of three semiconductor manufacturing fabrication plants in Phoenix, Arizona. The total package could come to $11.6 billion, inclusive of loans. This is the largest cash grant the US has awarded a foreign company and the largest single greenfield project by a foreign company in US history...
An incident involving the following of Taiwanese Vice President-elect Hsiao Bikhim’s motorcade by a vehicle driven by a Chinese military attache in Prague last week proves revealing. The Chinese military attache was following Hsiao in a vehicle, as a means of harassment, and was stopped by Czech police due to his following Hsiao’s motorcade...
