Dueling commmemorations of the 823 Artillery Bombardment took place yesterday in Kinmen. 823 refers to the Chinese attack on Kinmen that started the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis. In many ways, between the commemorations held by KMT and DPP, the two commemorations were much more about life today...
The KMT rallied for food safety last weekend, lashing out at the Lai administration over a food oil safety scandal after accusations of cooking oil adulteration by Central Oil Corporation. This would be hitting out at a familiar political issue in Taiwan, one that routinely leads to scandals every decade or so. Indeed, the previous major food scandal affected Ting Hsin and was leveraged to attack the then-ruling Ma administration by the DPP. One notes that food safety scandals can be reliably counted on to galvanize rage in Taiwanese politics...
The debate over what to do with the Control Yuan has become increasingly contested, as linked with continued partisan splits between the pan-Blue and pan-Green camps...
The KMT has hit out at the reduction of sentences for three former DPP staffers and the acquittal of one former DPP staffer in connection with a Chinese spying case...
The Lai administration has moved to expand bans on Taiwanese government officials traveling to China to participate in the annual Straits Forum, traditionally a venue for signaling between the CCP and KMT...
Civil society groups demonstrated outside of DPP headquarters late last month, in protest against the Lai administration’s failure to live up to campaign promises to build social housing. In particular, civil society groups criticized the Lai administration for promising to build 130,000 units of social housing during elections, then quietly revising this down to 40,000 units...
Thousands demonstrated on Sunday against the KMT’s cuts to defense spending, which reduced spending from 1.25 trillion NT to 780 billion NT. The main organizer of the demonstration was the Economic Democracy Union, the politically progressive social movement organization that played a key role in the 2014 Sunflower Movement and 2024 Bluebird Movement...
