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 Min-Hua Chiang. This article examines Taiwan’s 2025 growth surge, driven by ICT exports, capital formation, and booming semiconductors, while showing stagnant consumption, rising inequality, inflation, and housing burdens. It argues that concentrated income in tech undermines social cohesion and urges government spending, diversification, and AI-enabled upgrading across lagging industries for sustainable growth ahead.
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 Laura Bonsaver. This article proposes that Europe should move beyond threat-centric framings of Taiwan and recognise it as an innovative, democratic, and technologically advanced partner. It recommends de-hyphenating Taiwan from militaristic narratives, normalising its role in Indo-Pacific strategies, and reframing Europe-Taiwan relations as mutually beneficial collaborations rather than dependency or crisis management.
Written by Chien, Hung-yi. This article reflects on a National Day reception hosted by Taiwan’s representative office in a NATO member state on its eastern flank. Answering the question of what happened in Taiwan 114 years ago highlights two national-historical narratives of Taiwan. The author believes a Taiwan-centred view aligns more closely with lived reality and explains Taiwan’s complicated history to international friends.
Written by Ching-yuan (Joy) Hung and Mu-Chen (Jenny) Liu. This article tells the shared journey of two NTU graduate students who interned at the Kew Gardens. Immersed in diverse experiences, including seed imaging, herbarium tours, and a culture of scientific exchange, they found renewed purpose in research, which led both to reimagine their paths toward doctoral studies and global collaboration.
Written by Tzu-Li Yang. The author shares his engagement in specimen curation, trait data building, and cross-cultural learning while interning at Kew Gardens, which transformed his view of herbaria – from static collections to dynamic data systems supporting global botanical collaboration.
Written by Ni-Chen Lin and Chih-Wei Hsieh. Two NTU students, Ni-Chen and Chih-Wei, joined Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank through the NTU Overseas Internship Programme. Their experiences, studying seed survival and tree seed diversity, broadened their global perspectives on conservation. Returning to Taiwan, both apply Kew’s collaborative, research-driven values in academic and governmental roles.
Taiwan Insight 