Written by Mark Wenyi Lai. The differences between China’s June Fourth Incident in 1989 and Taiwan’s Wild Lily Student movement in 1990 indicate the cross-Strait increasing divergence of political paths over the past thirty years. The former ended with Type 59 tanks on Tiananmen Square and a more tightened and illiberal CCP governance.
Written by Margaret K. Lewis. The thirtieth anniversary of the massacre in Beijing highlights Taiwan’s importance as a site of protest and its precarious situation as a refugee host.
Written by Mab Huang. The struggle for human dignity, basic rights and a better life, to be sure, will be long and hard, but there is no alternative to commitment by, and engagement from, every individual, civil society organization, government and the United Nations, or what is left of it.
Written by Vincenzo R. Palmisano. This article was inspired by an application filed before the Rome Court of Appeal in Italy concerning the recognition of a final judgment issued in Taiwan by the District Court of New Taipei. It provides a curious case of how Taiwan’s de facto statehood can be interpreted abroad.
Written by John F. Copper. For more than two years the liberal Western media, especially in the United States, have talked and written extensively about America’s relations with Taiwan under Donald J. Trump. During this period their narratives embraced two different themes: first, the relationship was managed badly and second, Taiwan is a “card” Trump is playing against China.
Written by Joanna Zylinska. Chen Shui-bian’s presidency has been said to be a period of polarization, typified by aggressive nation-building policies and worsening cross-Strait relations. He became president in May 2000 and at first enjoyed widespread support.
Written by the CWLF.
In order to counter the declining birth-rate in Taiwan, in August 2018 the Executive Yuan enacted new childcare policies to support families with children aged zero to five. The new policies mainly consist of expanding the scale of public childcare services, establishing a set of mechanisms for quasi-public childcare providers, and raising childcare subsidies.
Written by Eric Chen-hua Yu. Empirical studies on presidential approval ratings in the US and other OECD countries have long concluded that the state of the economy is an important factor explaining the rise and fall of presidential approval ratings. Specifically, when economic conditions are good, the sentiment toward the president will be positive. In light of this correlation, does the presidential approval rating in Taiwan follow such a pattern?
Written by J. Michael Cole. In recent months, no subject has been brought up more often by Taiwan watchers than the party infighting that has been developing within the blue and green camps in the lead-up to Taiwan’s general elections next January. Much of that interest stems from the impact that the candidate selection, and of course the election itself, will have on Taiwan’s future external policy at a time of unprecedented engagement opportunities for the island-nation.
Written by Weiting Guo. While some may think that we have garnered enough fragments of Huang Bamei’s life, one should bear in mind that the richness of her literary representations, together with the scarcity of her appearance in official documents, may have made her disappear inside the conventions of her own stories—a dilemma that often appears in the memories of mythologized figures.
Written by Chia-Yuan Huang. Unlike the so-called Taiwanese ‘elites’ or ‘talents’ who were headhunted by Singaporean companies with the highest-level employment pass, a number of recently-migrated young Taiwanese workers in Singapore are engaged in the service industry. Most work on a contractual basis, dispatched by an agency and hold the lowest-level work pass (hereafter WP), which has many restrictions.
Written by Chao-Hsuan Chen. In the past two decades, a number of researchers have sought to determine how the process of social protest after 1970s became the turning point in Taiwan’s democratization. However, the authoritarian Kuomintang’s (KMT) process of shaping the local electoral system, especially in the 1950s, has seldom been the subject of concern.
Taiwan Insight 