Controversy has broken out over actions by Taipei Agricultural Products Marketing Corporation director Wu Yin-ning. While opponents of Wu allege corruption or at least incompetence, defenders of Wu allege that Wu has been caught in the crossfire between the KMT, DPP, and Taipei mayor Ko Wen-Je...
A recent five-day visit to Taiwan late last month by Haitian president Jovenel Moïse ended with Haiti walking away with a 150 million dollar investment by Taiwan in Haiti’s power grid...
It proves a disgraceful fact that Taiwan does little to help human rights activists and political dissidents internationally in need of safe harbor, even under a DPP administration. This has been raised in the news lately after Chinese human rights activist Huang Yan, who has been granted political refugee status by the UN, fled to Taiwan seeking asylum. Huang has been granted three month stay in Taiwan, after which she will have to move elsewhere...
A murder case from earlier this year involving a Hong Kong student murdered in Taiwan by her boyfriend, also from Hong Kong, may go unpunished due to legal loopholes regarding Taiwan’s lack of official recognition by Hong Kong and the lack of any extradition treaty. The case raises a number of issues that could affect relations between Hong Kong and Taiwan going forward...
Reflexive anger from Taiwanese publishers after reports earlier this month by the United Daily News that the Ministry of Culture was planning on screening Chinese books allowed to be published in China shows in microcosm the dilemmas facing free speech in Taiwan. Yet this also shows why free speech is aggressively defended in Taiwan and unlikely to come under threat from the government anytime soon...
The recent “499 Chaos” ultimately proves no laughing matter given that it has its roots in the poor salaries faced by Taiwanese and the dominance of major Taiwanese industries by a small number of powerful companies...
As the two year anniversary of the Tsai administration taking power was on May 20th, recent comments by Tsai Ing-Wen on what she has accomplished to date in the two years of her presidency suggest that Tsai has not wholly abandoned attempts to keep the civil society groups that took public prominence after the Sunflower Movement happy...
As with past years, Taiwan’s lack of membership in the World Health Organization has become a matter of controversy again. Taiwan is currently blocked from participating in the World Health Organization and the WHO’s governing body, the World Health Assembly, due to Chinese pressure...
Reports that the Taiwan Civil Government is being investigated for fraud and scam activity may surprise few. However, it seems unlikely that the underlying ideology of the group will go away anytime soon. After all, vaguely similar conspiracy theories exist all over the world, but the underlying ideology of the Taiwan Civil Government would be one uniquely a product of Taiwan’s unusual geopolitical situation...
A fee dispute between some of Taiwan’s most significant television networks has touched upon long-standing concerns about undue attempts to influence political developments through the media. Namely, television network Formosa TV has alleged that FoxConn CEO Terry Gou is attempting to use the fee dispute to prevent Formosa TV programs from being shown as a form of political censorship...
