Politics and polemic Archive

Tone deaf: Taiwan’s mobile phone providers continue to confound

There’s nothing like a good old fashioned whinge to see in the New Year, and this New Year has provided me with one nice and early. This week, No. 2 son’s time came. He’s been incredibly helpful around the flat – doing chores when he hasn’t even been asked, trying his best in a school […]
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Huang’s uneasy time in the spotlight

My op-ed from Taipei Times, Sunday 26 November: Foreign policy was always going to be tricky for President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) administration. It was one of the few areas that her predecessor, Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), could hail as a success when he left power on single-digit approval ratings. Granted, Ma’s can be regarded as something […]
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Playing with Fire: Taiwan and India’s Long Courtship

The following piece appeared in the Fall 2017 (Vol.12, No.3) issue of Global Asia: The visit to India by a group of Taiwanese parliamentarians in February drew predictable guard-dog growls from Beijing. Any country foolhardy enough to flout the sacrosanct one-China policy can expect a swift rebuke. But, for a powerful neighbor and competitor with […]
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Working the fields: Wooster Group’s performance invites parallels with Taiwan’s indigenous folk music

The following piece appeared in the features section of today’s Taipei Times: Taiwan owes Kurosawa Takatomo. Without his efforts, much of Taiwan’s indigenous music would be lost. In 1943, while Aborigine soldiers were packed off to fight Japan’s war in the Pacific as part of the Takasago Volunteers (高砂義勇隊) squadrons, Kurosawa was recording the songs […]
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Taiwan’s Female Athletes Still Fighting Institutionalized Sexism

Anyone who kept half an eye on local media coverage of the 2017 Taipei Summer Universiade that closed on Aug. 31 will likely have noticed the sometimes cringe-worthy manner in which Taiwan’s female athletes were “feted” for their achievements. It didn’t take long for this brand of patronizing sexism to rear its head at the […]
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Our man in Panama

Below is the original version of my op-ed in today’s Taipei Times. I had a feeling they’d chop the paragraph about the corruption during the Chen years, and what do you know? They also made a complete pig’s ear of the headline. As General Manuel Noriega’s fortunes fluctuated with the whims of the U.S. […]
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Changes to Nationality Law irk Taiwan’s foreign-born residents

My article from today’s News Lens (27/03/2017). An old friend and mentor of mine still likes to say that I quit a journalism degree 20 years ago because I didn’t like talking to people on the phone. Like the work of our mutual hero, Ryszard Kapuściński, this claim lurks in an anteroom between reality and fiction: […]
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Colonialism can never be justified

Below is my piece from today’s News Lens ( 23 March, 2017): As European colonial and imperial exploits reached their apogee in the late 19th century, moral philosophers such a John Stuart Mill were faced with a quandary: how to justify the colonial project? In fact, it doesn’t seem to have been too much of […]
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Li Kuo-Ting: The adaptable strategist behind Taiwan’s success

“Li Kuo-ting’s name,” wrote Hong Kong economist Tony Fu-Lai Yu (余赴禮), “is well-known in Taiwan.” If this were true when Yu penned the words 10 years ago, it certainly isn’t now. Granted, as Yu points out, Li’s name (李國鼎) is enshrined in a foundation that funds scientific endeavor in Taiwan and promotes cross-Strait cooperation in science. An […]
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Dark shadows and new hope: Taiwan and El Salvador

The single shot from a rifle that hit Archbishop Oscar Romero straight in the heart as he was saying mass at San Salvador’s Church of the Divine Providence on the evening of March 24, 1980, was to send shockwaves through El Salvador and the world. Even in a country where murder had become a way […]
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