Written by Yo-Ling Chen. This article illustrates how Taiwan’s Assisted Reproduction Act amendments, while expanding access for unmarried women and lesbian couples, continue to exclude many transgender people by anchoring eligibility to legal gender. Tracing legislative debates, activist interventions, and medical research, it exposes a regime of passive eugenics and considers whether recent parliamentary critiques signal a shift toward transgender reproductive justice.
Written by Pei-Chieh Hsu. This article illustrates how state-subsidised assisted reproductive technology has reshaped reproduction in Taiwan, situating Taiwan’s In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) within global pronatalist regimes, fiscal governance, and demographic anxiety. It analyses policy design, comparative fertility outcomes, and ethnographic IVF experiences to show how subsidies engineered technological dependence while reproducing new social, medical, and moral hierarchies.
Written by Yi-Ping Wu. This article recounts Taiwan’s 2025 cultural budget cuts amid political turmoil yet highlights the resilience of Taiwan’s theatrical landscape through the Taipei Theatre Awards, the Off-Broadway debut of Don’t Cry, Dancing Girls, the 2025 Expo Osaka initiatives, and the Les Misérables tour in Taipei and Kaohsiung, revealing international ambition despite systemic discrimination against the arts.
Written by Yo-Ling Chen. This article reviews the year 2025 for Taiwan, which saw growing civil society support for transgender rights alongside intensifying anti-gender mobilisation, often echoing U.S. conservative politics. Yet the government failed to deliver substantive policy reform, maintaining compulsory surgery for legal gender change while sidelining transgender needs in assisted reproduction and conscription policy. The result was political stagnation amid expanding grassroots advocacy.
Written by Aleksandrs Gross. This article analyses recent Taiwan-Japan solidarity amid tensions between Japan and China. It captures how widespread and deep mutual support is at the grassroots, people-to-people level in both countries. The current tense political climate has only deepened the friendship between the two peoples. This benefits Taiwan and puts China in a tricky position.
Written by Carissa Cheng. Despite strong economic growth, Taiwan’s youth face stagnant wages, soaring housing costs, and limited opportunities, prompting many to abandon the DPP for the TPP in 2024. The article argues economic insecurity, party factionalism, and perceptions of elitism drove this shift, and urges the DPP to refocus on youth-centred economic policy, messaging, and reform.
Written by Leona Chen. This article reflects on The Boy from Clearwater, a translated graphic memoir that intertwines Tsai Kun-lin’s life with the author’s own diasporic longing. Through vivid illustrations and intergenerational memory, the graphic novel becomes a conduit for Taiwanese American readers seeking connection, historical understanding, and ancestral intimacy across language, distance, and time.
Written by Chee-Hann Wu. This article shares the rise of Taiwanese BL comics, which increasingly portray ordinary, everyday same-sex relationships without much sexuality-related conflict. These works exemplify comforting, relatable stories that reflect a society where love is simply lived.
Written by I-Yun Lee. This article is an overview that traces Taiwanese comics from Japanese colonial to post-war Taiwan, the rise of rental comics, and the severe censorship that stifled creators from the 1960s to the 1980s. Shaped by colonial importation, market demand, and state control, Taiwan’s comic history emerges as a story of negotiation and constraint.
Written by Isis M. Lee. A landmark exhibition in Prague displays 100 masterpieces from Taiwan’s National Palace Museum — yet Taiwan itself disappears from the story. This erasure reveals how authoritarian pressure increasingly shapes cultural spaces far beyond China’s borders.
Written by Aleksandrs Gross. This article explores a unique phenomenon that occurred during the recalls – small businesses explicitly voiced their stance on the recalls. This mirrors similar patterns of Hong Kong during the pro-democracy movement in 2019. The author interviewed three pro-recall businesses to understand their stance and how they encourage constructive discussion without alienating opponents.
Written by Gita T. This article examines how Taiwan could better identify and nurture the quieter forms of cognitive talent that often go unnoticed — helping students find stronger alignment between aptitude and work, reducing early burnout, and building an education framework that allows curiosity to breathe. In that sense, Taiwan’s next great export could be curiosity itself.
Taiwan Insight 