While meant to be a cause for celebration in Taiwan, as marking the start of the largest international sporting event ever held in Taiwan, the opening ceremonies of the Taipei 2017 Summer Universiade were instead a cause for media spectacle and anger from the Taiwanese public...
Outrage and shock has broken out in the academic world and beyond with the censoring of articles from the China Quarterly, a leading journal of the China studies published by Cambridge University Press, in order to comply with orders from the Chinese party-state. Apart from this being revealing about the Chinese party-state's need to suppress information in order to prevent dissent, this may also return to inherent challenges of China Studies...
Violence in America by white supremacists increasingly encouraged by Donald Trump’s presidency to organize openly should have important lessons for Taiwan, not only because of what this reveals about America, but because of important parallels to Taiwan...
The Hong Kong Court of Appeal handed down jail sentences today to Joshua Wong, Nathan Law, and Alex Chow for participation in the 2014 Umbrella Movement protests, sentencing Wong to six months in jail, Law to eight months in jail, and Alex Chow to seven months in jail. The three have been billed Hong Kong's first political prisoners. What now for Hong Kong?...
With severe power outages in Taiwan yesterday affecting a 6.62 million individuals, close to 28 percent of Taiwan’s population of 23 million, much public anger has followed....
China may at present be adopting the strategy of arrogating territory within Hong Kong as subject to Chinese law in the Chinese mainland, rather than Hong Kong law as specified by the Hong Kong Basic Law, with the claim that this land is being leased to China. We see this with regards to the West Kowloon train station, in which sections of the station will be subject to Chinese rather than Hong Kong law. There is the dangerous possibility that China is establishing future legal grounds to put down resistance against its rule in Hong Kong—perhaps even using armed force...
Given recent news developments, it is strange, in fact, to observe that there has been little discussion of North Korea and Guam alongside Taiwan, given that all three are in some sense pariah states in the international community. We might venture some observations...
A recent letter in the Taipei Times by Tom Lee, head of the Friends of Tsai Overseas and president of the Taiwan Daily, reflecting on comments by Stephen Yates, a known “friend of Taiwan” and former US deputy national security advisor proves not only an interesting symptom of the blind spots in how many Taiwanese independence advocates conceive of US-Taiwan relations, but illustrates how many American "friends of Taiwan" fundamentally do not respect Taiwanese democracy, no matter what they might claim otherwise...
Several attempts by the KMT to delegitimize the actions of the Tsai administration which it views as threatening to its power of late have taken the curious tactic of reporting the Tsai administration to the Control Yuan...
A recent article written by Alex Lo, op-ed columnist at the South China Morning Post, has prompted ire in Taiwan because of its citing of claims by Taiwanese political pundit Chang Yu-Hua that at least four student leaders of the Sunflower Movement. Such sentiments are no surprise from Lo, a pro-Beijing pundit and political conservative, who publishes articles for the South China Morning Post daily as part of his “My Take” column. We might question the claims of his article, ultimately a sign of how the South China Morning Post is increasingly a Chinese propaganda organ...
