China may have succeeded in making Taiwan look petty in a recent row about aviation flight routes. Namely, Taiwan refused to approve flights from Chinese airlines China Eastern Airlines and Xiamen Air in retaliation for China’s unilateral declaration of the M503 flight route...
The Tsai administration has taken a decisive step in labelling the Chinese Women’s League to be a KMT-affiliated organization, meaning that the organization has been judged to not be a private organization, but a party organization of the KMT. The saga of the Tsai administration's KMT party assets probe coming into conflict with the Chinese Women's League is a bizarre one, seeing as the Chinese Women's League possesses more financial assets than the KMT publicly declared in 2017. This is illustrative of the vast wealth and resources that the league has if it has more resources at its disposal than one of the two major political parties in Taiwan. Attempts by former chairwoman Cecilia Koo—a former aide of Madame Chiang Kai-Shek—and her allies to defend the league have also been strange, in comparing the party assets probe to the widespread sexual harassment of women that the global #MeToo campaign has lashed out at, and claiming the Chinese Women's League to be the nation's first feminist organization...
Actions in mid-January by the KMT Youth League to demonstrate outside a talk by Rainer Eppelman on the experience of transitional justice in Germany, evidence that young people within the KMT continue to look at Taiwanese history in authoritarian lens...
Controversy regarding the appointment of recently elected National Taiwan University (NTU) president Kuan Chung-ming, who has yet to take office, is ironic. Namely, Kuan’s predecessor Yang Pan-chyr faced more or less the same issues, which led him to resign in June 2017...
The suspension of two students following demonstrations in Hong Kong against a new Mandarin requirement for graduation at Hong Kong Baptist University has provoked outrage among many...
Agnes Chow of Demosisto has been barred from running in a by-election for Hong Kong’s Legislative Council on the basis of that her party advocates “self-determination” for Hong Kong. What now for Hong Kong youth activists?...
Looking back on recent demonstrations against the Tsai administration’s planned changes to the Labor Standards Act, it may do well to review some of the reasons as to why protests did not spark anything on the scale of the Sunflower Movement, and why these demonstrations were, in that way, ultimately unsuccessful. Namely, these demonstrations in many ways replicated the dynamics of the Sunflower Movement, just less successfully. Perhaps this ultimately returns to structural shifts in Taiwanese society since 2014...
Longstanding conflict between environmentalists and the Taipei city government over historic trees near the Taipei Dome construction site may come to a head in the near future with the planned completion of the Taipei Dome...
Hong Kong localist Edward Leung pleading guilty to charges of assaulting a policeman, but rejecting riot charges, is the latest development in a series of arrests of high-profile social movement leaders which began since the jailing of the “Umbrella trio” of Joshua Wong, Nathan Law, and Alex Chow in August...