January 2018

Chinese Women’s League Ruled To Be A KMT-Affiliated Organization

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...

Why Did Demonstrations Against Labor Law Changes Not Become Another Sunflower Movement?

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...