Yesterday was the third anniversary of the kidnapping of Taiwanese human rights advocate Lee Ming-che. Lee, currently 45, disappeared in March 2017 after crossing over into China from Macau. Lee was detained on charges of seeking to subvert state power. Lee has now been detained for over 1,000 days...
The Chinese government announcing 26 new measures aimed at attracting Taiwanese firms is clearly a measure aimed at influencing Taiwanese elections, with just over sixty days left before January 2020 elections. However, what may be noteworthy is to what extent the Chinese government is falling back on tactics it has tried before in the past to influence elections, rather than coming up with new tactics...
The revelation that Taiwanese academic Tsai Chin-shu has been detained by China for over 420 days should be highly worrying. That Tsai was detained for over 400 days with no information coming to light about his imprisonment suggests a higher number of Taiwanese currently detained by the Chinese government than was previously known. Likewise, Tsai was a known advocate of unification with China, suggesting that China will not only target pro-independence activists for arbitrary detention...
A group of scholars from China and the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation, a Seattle-based US research center, recently published a paper in The Lancet. However, the paper, which is titled, “Mortality, morbidity, and risk factors in China and its provinces, 1990–2017: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017”, has serious scientific and ethical problems in order to serve its political purpose: to echo Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “China Dream” that “Taiwan is part of China”...
On the third of July, a group of American scholars and China watchers co-signed and published an op-ed with seven points in the Washington Post, titled “China is not an enemy". But the letter may simply reflect American naïveté; many in Taiwan, for one, would tell a drastically different story, that China is a threat to democracy on an island of 23 million people...
It may be of little surprise that Taiwan was blocked from participating in the annual summit of the World Health Assembly, the governing body of the World Health Organization, for a third straight year...
It seems highly likely that Taiwan’s current lack of any coherent policy for asylum seekers may explode into an international controversy in coming months, with a high number of high-profile refugees from Hong Kong and China facing possible deportation from Taiwan after their visas expire...
With a recent proposal by Kaohsiung mayor Han Kuo-yu to create free economic zones within Kaohsiung, one observes the unusual revival of a Ma era political idea: the establishment of special economic zones within Taiwan. Perhaps this should not surprise...
Two Chinese J-11 fighter aircraft crossed the median line of the Taiwan Straits at 11 AM yesterday morning, provoking strong reactions from within Taiwan and prompting the Taiwanese air force to mobilize five fighter planes in response. The incident was a break from precedent, seeing as while Chinese regularly fields planes in the Taiwan Straits, they do not usually cross the median line of the Taiwan Straits...
The meeting last week between North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and American president Donald Trump offers lessons for Taiwan in terms of Trump’s unpredictability...
