Autumn Struggle, one of Taiwan’s longest-running labor protests, demonstrated late last month on November 10th. As in past years, participants were mainly left-wing labor organizations. Around two hundred participated in the rally...
Perhaps the most noteworthy thing about the Qiao Collective’s “Taiwan: An Anti-Imperialist Perspective”, published in the Monthly Review, is to what extent it focuses on premodern history–and to what extent the Taiwanese people are absent from a history purportedly about them. This should not surprise for Qiao, but one still finds one’s self somewhat surprised that the Monthly Review allowed for the publication of a perspective on history that is clearly more cultural nationalist than Marxist...
A proposal by the Ishigaki city government in Japan to rename the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyutai Islands, in order to reaffirm Japanese claims of sovereignty over the island, has been led to nationalistic responses in Taiwan among members of the KMT and members of the pan-Blue camp. This should not be particularly surprising...
Controversy has broken out in western academia after feminist academic Avital Ronell was accused of sexual harassment, particularly after highly reflexive defenses of Ronell from fellow high-profile academics on the political Left in the form of an open letter, including Judith Butler and Slavoj Zizek. This bears a sharp parallel to incidents which have happened in leftist Taiwanese academia in the past two years and this may be worth reflecting on...
Coolloud has declared itself to be one of the most dedicated, independently funded leftist media in Taiwan. Traditionally, they have reported on social movements and protests that were seldom covered by the mainstream press. However, with the rise of independent media in the recent years, the political direction of Coolloud has increasingly become a position of opposition against the so-called “mainstream” social movements in Taiwan instead of right-wing forces or the state...
Probably it is best at this point to refer to Coolloud not as a left-wing publication which writes on social movements in Taiwan, but an outright Chinese nationalist publication of the pro-unification Left...
Some odd reactions have appeared in recent days among members of the Taiwanese pro-unification Left and Chinese New Leftists online after recent actions by American president Donald Trump. What they reveal is Chinese nationalism taking precedent over leftism...
Irrespective of its content, Petrus Liu’s Queer Marxism in Two Chinas probably would have found success on the basis of its title containing the words “Queer,” “Marxism,” and “China”. That may be the point...
What are the politics that undergird Hou Hsiao-Hsien's "The Assassin", which has been much fêted on the film festival circuit? Are they ultimately the politics of Taiwan's pro-unification Left?...
Once again as with last year's Sunflower Movement we find ourselves in the situation where a small segment of the self-proclaimed Left backs away from a mass uprising of Taiwanese society, claiming it to be right-wing populism....
