The Taiwanese government announced that it was breaking diplomatic ties with the Solomon Islands on Tuesday, after a vote by the Solomon Island’s coalition government caucus in favor of ending diplomatic relations with Taiwan and establishing relations with China...
FoxConn CEO Terry Gou surprised yesterday with an announcement that he would not be running in 2020 presidential elections, with Taipei mayor Ko wen-je stating earlier today in the wake of Gou's announcement that he also would not be running. Today, September 17th, was the deadline for registering with the Central Election Commission as an independent candidate. In the meantime, in the pan-Green camp, the Formosa Alliance has unexpectedly announced plans to run Annette Lu as their presidential candidate...
Thailand is not widely known as a carceral state, but with the world's fourth-highest incarceration rate, it is one of the easiest places in the world to end up in prison...
The internal crisis of the NPP continues, with elements of the party leadership seemingly still uncommitted to endorsing Tsai Ing-wen of the DPP in 2020 presidential elections and continuing to flirt with the idea of nominating former chair Huang Kuo-chang as the NPP’s presidential candidate. These primarily seem to be older members of the NPP, suggesting an inability to overcome generational inertia in the NPP. In the meantime, the DPP is increasingly taking steps to run young candidates in 2020 elections and appointing young people to high positions within the party...
Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je has received a great deal of blowback in the past week, as most visible in a sharp decline in the number of “Likes” Ko has his Facebook page. Ko’s Facebook page has now lost 150,000 “Likes” in a matter of days, bringing his total “Like” count to less than two million. Ko originally had around 2,100,000 “Likes” on Facebook. Ko provoked ire after comments referring to Presidential Office secretary-general and former Kaohsiung mayor Chen Chu as a “fat version of Han Kuo-yu” and claiming that he had heard that Taiwanese actress and model Lin Chi-ling was pregnant on the basis of rumors that he had heard...
The Formosa Alliance's attempt to prove that Tsai Ing-wen’s dissertation is fake proves another strange turn for the recently formed pro-independence political party. In general, the Formosa Alliance is proving to be a party which seems to have no real political stance apart from hardline Taiwanese independence advocacy and hatred of Tsai Ing-wen...
The long path for transitional justice to be achieved in Taiwan is evident in the challenges faced by efforts to bring the truth of major incidents during the White Terror to light. President Tsai Ing-wen vowed to do so in July through declassifying the files of the National Security Bureau and other institutions of the ROC state that carried out political persecutions on behalf of the KMT during the authoritarian period...
The magistrates of Kinmen, Mazu, and Penghu visited Beijing earlier this month to hold a meeting with Liu Jieyi, the director of China’s Taiwan Affairs Office on August 12th...
The possibility of China sterilizing Uighurs has become more widely reported on after reports by the Nikkei and other outlets citing former detainees who claim they have been sterilized after being detained in prison camps...
